#moe in the bushes: answer the question!

[coolpointsetta]

jamie: do we still have to get up at 4am to train?

roy, down on one knee (which took him a few minutes to do), literally proposing: is that really what you’re worried about right now?

[madscientistjournal]

Fiction: Jehovah's Feathers

An essay by Mary Magdalene Farconi, as provided by K. Kitts Art by Leigh Legler

Strapped in his bouncy seat, my son Tyler went off at the exact same moment as the kitchen timer and the doorbell. I verified that nothing was actually gnawing on him and rushed to the brownies. Paul would have to get the door.

From the living room, Cissie yelled, “It’s the bird people.” Being a good girl, she knew not to open the door to strangers, especially those from another planet.

I yelled, “Paul, get the door,” while I yanked the brownies from the oven.

The Home Owners Association bake sale started at 10 AM, and it was already 10:10. In my head, Mrs. Topher, the HOA president, admonished, “In my day, people respected each other and were on time.”

As I dashed toward Tyler, I mumbled, “Yeah, back when Moses parted the Red Sea, most mothers of young children didn’t have to analyze a 270-page watershed impact statement by Monday.”

Before I unbuckled Tyler from his seat, I smelled his problem. The doorbell rang again. “Paul! Get the door!”

From the living room, Cissie yelled, “The bird people are still here.”

I hustled down the hall with Tyler at arm’s length. His room also served as Paul’s home office. Sure enough. Paul had his earbuds in and was playing some computer game. I hip-butted the back of his chair.

Startled, he yelled, “What the–” but stopped in time. We try not to cuss like muleskinners in front of the kids. I handed Tyler over.

“I’m working, Maggie. You do it.” He tried to pass Tyler back.

The doorbell rang a third time. Cissie called, “The bird people are still still here.”

I said, “One, since when is slaying boss monsters a part of your job? And two, it’s Saturday. We agreed on Saturdays you have to help. No questions asked.” As I stomped to the front door, I muttered, “That is if you ever want to have sex again.”

Hand on the knob, I breathed in deeply and exhaled. Bird people are sensitive. I didn’t want to frighten them because they’d take off in a flurry of feathers and shrieks and dump whatever they had in their cloacas. I didn’t have time to hose off the front porch.

I’d worked with several bird people when I’d served as an analyst for the newly established Alien Affairs Bureau. That was until the AAB’s work rules changed and became intolerable for nursing moms. Two months after Tyler was born, I moved to a clean water non-profit with a short commute. The work wasn’t as important, but my hair had stopped falling out. However, when I opened the door, I wondered whether I’d been out of the loop a little too long.

Instead of a group of sleek greenish-blue peacock-cranes, there stood two bedraggled and dull office drones dressed in modified white button-downs and khakis. Their tails were clipped and their wings pressed tightly against their backs. Even the frills on the tops of their heads drooped. They were both so dull in color, I couldn’t tell whether they were male or female, but given the office casual, I guessed males.

Clutched in one of the T-Rex arms that protruded from beneath his breast, the left bird person held a black book. His colleague grasped a plastic sheet upon which text flickered.

I asked, “May I help you?”

Book bird bobbed his head and pressed the first icon on the squawk box on a chain around his neck. In a mellifluous voice, the box intoned, “Good morning! We are in your neighborhood seeking to expand our flock.”

Book bird bobbed his head and pressed the first icon on the squawk box on a chain around his neck. In a mellifluous voice, the box intoned, “Good morning! We are in your neighborhood seeking to expand our flock.”

I frowned. If they were looking for females, they were out of luck. Our HOA categorically refused all building permits for aviaries. And with such poor color, I doubted any female would give them the time of day.

He cocked his head and pressed the second icon. The box asked, “Have you been saved by Jesus?”

I face-palmed. Flocking was extremely important to them. It made sense they’d become a target of some strip mall prophet, but where was their female, and why would she allow this to happen? “To which home nest do you belong?”

“Reverend Vernon P. Hogg,” said the plastic paper bird. He passed the flickering sheet over.

The title read: The Watch Perch. The address running along the top was the old non-denominational church that had sold its parking lot to the highway extension.

Articles flitted past on how Jesus could save the faithful from obesity, drunkenness, and bird lice. “No, I mean your mother bird. Who is she?” I tried to return the plastic paper, but the bird refused to take it.

“Our Most Supreme Singing Heart,” he said.

The book bird squawked and his box translated, “She who laid us has asked us to go into the world and find a new flock.”

That was odd. I’d worked with Singing Heart when they set up the reservation. Alpha females never let go of their sons until they could find another female to take them in. Things had to be bad on the Rez for her to cut them loose.

“Where do you sleep?”

The book bird’s box said, “At the church.”

“Except on bingo night, knitter’s club night, and days with AA meetings.”

“Then we sleep in the park.”

“But that’s more difficult now. They cut down the bushes to keep the homeless out.”

These two were definitely nest-mates.

The phone rang and Paul yelled, “It’s Mrs. Topher. She wants to know where you are.”

“Listen, I’ve got to go. Good luck in finding new flock members.” I shut the door before the bird people could object.

I dumped The Watch Perch into the electronics recycle bin and changed from my mommy clothes–puke-stained shirt and yoga pants–to my work clothes of white shirt and blue pants. My resemblance to the male drones was not lost on me. I grabbed a not too stinky towel from the clothes hamper and nestled the hot pan of brownies on the front floorboards of the van. After fetching Cissie and buckling her into the child seat, Paul strolled out with my purse and Tyler.

He asked, “Aren’t you going to take him with you?”

I tucked my purse behind my seat. “Did you clean out and refill the diaper bag like you promised?”

He made a Homer Simpson d’oh face.

I smiled sweetly. “Then, there’s your answer.”

As I backed out of the driveway, Paul came running from the front door, waving the plastic paper. I powered down the window.

“Take this with you. It keeps crawling out of the recycle bin. It beeps and says you owe at least a five-dollar donation.”

Making a face, I took the paper. “I’ll drop it off at the church on the way back.” I shoved it under the brownies. They were no longer hot enough to melt it. Too bad.

Mrs. Topher was a sturdy woman with a toad-like mouth: thin-lipped and broad. This week her hair was an auburn color on the orange side. She lived on the biggest property with a pool deck the size of our entire house. I would’ve thought a competent stylist was within her budget.

Cissie joined the other kids playing tag outside the HOA’s clubhouse, and I settled in the folding chair next to Mrs. Topher. As I cut and bagged the brownies, she added the label and the price.

“Are these boxed or homemade?”

“I baked them myself.”

She marked them two for a dollar and tossed them in the boxed section. “Because you were forty-five minutes late, I assume you’ll work the table until 12:45?”

It wasn’t a question, but I didn’t mind. There were activities for Cissie, and Mrs. Topher pounced on any poor victim who wandered within ten feet of the table, giving me time to wade through the impact statement. An hour in, Mrs. Topher became agitated after receiving a series of texts and calls.

I tried to ignore her harrumphing and heavy sighs, but it was a losing battle. “You seem upset, Mrs. Topher. Is there anything–”

“The cretin bailed on us.”

I could see Mr. Topher in a cluster of men near the parking lot. So it wasn’t a marital issue.

“This is the third investor. Third! They say they’re interested, but once they see the engineer’s report, they lose my phone number.”

Now I understood. The HOA had been trying to get an investor to take over and finish up the subdivision. The bake sale was to help with attorney’s fees. The original builder had gone belly up when he discovered it was harder to drain a swamp than he’d imagined.

��This idiot is suggesting we donate the land to the state as a designated wetlands.”

“That would take care of–”

Her penciled-in eyebrows arched. “If you’d attended the last meeting, you’d know that the tax write-off will not offset the loss in fees. We’ll have to raise the rates again. If there were only some way we could squash that stupid report.”

“Cuz that wouldn’t be illegal or anything,” I said.

Mrs. Topher stared daggers at me.

~

By 1:15, Cissie and I were at the church. Vernon P. Hogg himself was setting up chairs for the 2 PM book club. Vern looked forty, despite being much younger. From his teeth, I suspected his drug of choice had been meth.

I handed him the plastic paper. “If this thing finds its way back to my house, I’ll report you for littering.”

He sighed and punched in a code. He dropped it in a pile on an old piano with chipped keys. It calmly sat there no longer flashing or inching toward me like a possessed credit card bill.

“Let’s talk about the two bird people,” I said.

“No, let’s not. I was just trying to help them out, and all they’ve brought me is trouble.” He opened a side door and yelled, “Hey, Larry and Curly! Get your feathered asses in here.”

Cissie hid behind me, staring at the scary man. I folded my arms. “If they’re Larry and Curly, who are you? Moe or Shemp?”

“Very funny. I didn’t pick the names, they did.”

The two bedraggled bird people hustled in, bowing and bobbing their long necks. In unison, they clicked an icon on their boxes. “How may we serve you, Father Hogg?”

I raised an eyebrow. Vernon said quickly, “I tol’ you boys. You’re supposed to say, ‘How may we serve Jesus, Father Hogg?'”

The two bird people looked confused and corrected the text associated with that icon.

“It doesn’t matter.” He waved his fingers as if to shoo chickens. “You two are fired. Get out of my church and go darken someone else’s doorstep.” He turned to me. “Are you happy now?”

The two bird people screeched and flapped their clipped wings. “What have we done wrong? How can we make amends?”

They kept tapping the icons repeating those two sentences until Vernon grabbed a mop handle and threatened to beat them. Cissie burst into tears and threw herself in front of the bird people. Her little arms out wide, she yelled, “I won’t let you hurt them!”

Cissie’s action shocked Vernon. He sighed. “I told you all they do is get me in trouble.”

I rested my hand on Cissie’s head. She melted into my leg, wiping snot and tears on the back of her hand. The bird people clustered behind me and froze, as if that made them invisible.

“Jesus!” Vernon shouted. One of them had dumped his cloaca. “Look what I have to clean up!” He spun around twice on the broken-down heel of his faux alligator boots. “I got people comin’! Payin’ people!”

Good thing he didn’t have a cloaca.

“I don’t want them fired,” I said. “I just don’t want anyone to take advantage of them.”

“Taking advantage, hell. I’m helping them out!”

I pointed to the pile of The Watch Perch. I would’ve waved one in his face, but I feared touching them.

He whined, “I paid their vagrancy tickets for sleeping in the park.”

Hands on hips, I asked, “Did you clip their wings?”

He shook his head. “They have to be clipped to get off the Rez. Some new regulation ‘cuz people claimed they were peeking in windows and messing with security.”

I’d heard about no-fly zones, but I hadn’t thought through all the implications. “Can you keep them for a couple more days while I figure something out?”

“Not those two. They’re dumber than pigeons. I’ll keep the other three.”

“Five? You’re housing five bird people?”

“There’re a dozen under the bridges near the river. They’re pouring off the Rez, and they’re all looking as sad as these two. I think they’re starving.”

I looked at my phone. If I ignored the speed limit, I could get to Singing Heart’s compound in two hours. I called to Cissie, “Sweetheart, help the bird people into the van.”

Cissie’s entire being lit up. “I knew you would save them, mommy. I knew you would!” She herded them like ducks outside. I felt a flicker of pride before reality hit. I hadn’t saved anyone.

~

Larry and Curly strutted through the backyard, eating insects, while I told Paul what happened. He squatted to Cissie’s level. “Did you really do that? Protect those bird people?” She nodded fiercely. He gave her a bear hug. “I’m so proud of you.”

My heart swelled. I kissed Paul on his neck. “You’re a good man.”

Cissie ran off to tell her dollies about her adventures. I fetched the car keys.

Paul shook his head. “It’s late.”

“I’ve got to see for myself. Something’s up.”

He looped his arm around my neck. “Sweetie, you can’t save the world.”

“No, but I simply walked away, and that’s not working for me either.” The emotion made my voice crack.

“You were burned out. With the commute and Tyler–”

“Yeah, but if I don’t do anything at all, then I’m part of the problem. I don’t want that to be the lesson I teach Cissie.”

He met my eye. “After what Cissie did today, are you seriously worried?”

I smiled but hung my head. Paul got out his wallet and handed me cash.

“What’s this for?”

“Gas. But I’m keeping the rest ‘cuz I’m not making dinner. I’m ordering pizza.”

~

I entered Reservation land at 4:40. It bordered the river in a swampy valley that produced mostly mosquitoes. Singing Heart’s high status had afforded her first choice in picking her home nest site. It was the closest to the blacktop. The climate was hot and humid, but the birds liked it that way. I kept my windows up and the AC on. Singing Heart’s people on average looked better than the two drones, but there were no children in the crèche and even the females were out in the river working.

The two male guards at the entrance of Singing Heart’s aviary were still resplendent with long tails, elegant wings, and piercing black eyes. They sported the sharpened beak spikes and leg spurs of their class. One recognized me and asked me to wait. He sent a small messenger male inside. After a few minutes, I was ushered into the geodesic dome that functioned as Singing Heart’s main dormitory.

Inside resembled a rain forest arboretum. Industrial fans created a slight breeze and made it easier for me to breathe. I walked slowly to keep from sweating too much. Designed for visitors and fledglings, the path wound upward. The adults glided from perches set along the struts two-thirds of the way up the sides. The top of the curved path opened onto a platform for meetings. Above that sat Singing Heart’s nest. One of her daughters roosted in it. The other nests lay empty.

Singing Heart’s frill was up and her feathers fluffed. On the platform, her brown and green plumage shone brightly in the late afternoon sun, but in the dappled places among the plants, she’d have blended in perfectly. Her neck extended, she stood tall. My eye met her beak. For the first time in her presence, I felt the flutter of discomfort and fear, as if the trouble–whatever it may be–was somehow my fault. I asked, “Did you release two males?”

Singing Heart’s wings came away from her body, and all the other birds in the dome came to attention. “Yes. Why?”

Out of nowhere one of the male guards landed with a thump next to me.

I put my hand out in a placating motion. “They’re at my house.”

Singing Heart lifted her knees one at a time and shook out her feathers. The other birds relaxed, and the guard bird moved to the edge of the platform but did not fly off.

“They are good men, but we have no room for them.”

“May I ask why?”

“Come. Walk with me.”

Singing Heart could’ve glided to the exit in a heartbeat, but she walked slowly, one long stride after another, so I could keep up. Once outside of the dome, Singing Heart flicked her tail feathers. The guard remained behind.

“Children can be impetuous and impatient,” she said.

“Are you talking about these two males?” I asked.

“No. My eldest daughter. She couldn’t control herself and fertilized two eggs. I’m sure you saw her nesting.”

“Are resources so tight that you don’t have room for two more?”

“It’s a matter of leadership. If my home nest doesn’t control its population, I can’t ask that of others.”

“The valley looks lush, is there a shortage of food?”

“Your government insists that unless we put in a water treatment plant, we can have no population growth. They say we’re putting too much nitrogen into the water, but they won’t allow us to sell our technology, or use it to back a security you call municipal bonds.”

I pretended to examine the foliage to hide my chagrin. Singing Heart could read facial expressions, and her sight was superior to humans. Like most avians, she had an extra protein in the back of her eye and could see into the ultraviolet range. Her home star was very active and produced a lot of UV. In fact, it had become so active, it was eroding their planet’s atmosphere. That’s why they’d come to Earth, refugees from a natural disaster.

It was my fault. The clean water non-profit I worked for had been responsible for some of those clean water laws. Talk about unintended consequences. Now I understood why the state hadn’t fought the legislation. It was never about clean water. It was about population control. The non-profit and I had been suckered.

“How about making a home nest in town where there are sewers?” I asked.

“None of my daughters can get building permits.”

My own damn HOA had contributed to that problem.

We continued to the river. The water was clean but the banks boggy. Singing Heart waded out into the dark mud. She stretched her neck. It ballooned and she made a whooping roar that ended in a bellowing meow. All the females stopped what they were doing and responded. She called and they repeated for several rounds. The tone and pattern changed but not the volume. From downstream came a second set of calls and responses. When it did, Singing Heart shook her feathers and rejoined me on hard ground. The call would wind its way down the river to the end of the valley.

I didn’t need the translator. It was a gratitude psalm. A tear dripped down my cheek.

“Magdalene? What distresses you?”

My chin quivered. “How can you sing of gratitude considering how we treat you?”

“You’ve taken in my two sons. You cannot imagine my relief.”

It had been a sheer accident. And for how long could I keep them? An aspirin for a brain tumor.

Singing Heart asked, “You left the AAB because you were having difficulties with a fledgling? Is he well?”

“I left because it was too much stress to deal with a toddler, a nursing infant, a sexist boss, and an hour commute each way.” I blushed, ashamed of my pitiful problems. “I can’t imagine how you handle the stress of this place.”

Singing Heart bobbed her head. “I don’t do it alone. I have my flock. Your culture of complete independence is foolish.” She clucked and the box intoned, “You will do better now that you have my two sons. We have more to teach you than technology.”

“Technology!” I pointed to the birds in the river. “Your daughters all have equivalents of Ph.D.s, and they are reduced to stringing nets in a river.”

“Do you feel reduced when you take care of your fledglings?”

I remained silent. There were seasons in life, but my boss and my culture didn’t understand that, so I did feel less than no matter how wrong it was. I lifted my chin. “I make no promises, but now that I understand the issues, I can work on solutions.”

Singing Heart brushed me with a wing a sign of gratitude. But in this case, I took it as a gesture of forgiveness.

~

On Monday, instead of summarizing that 270-page impact statement, I presented the plight of the bird people. The staff members were divided as to what to do, but they agreed to an emergency board meeting to discuss the possible realignment of the mission of the non-profit. We were small and disorganized, but it was a start.

Moving on to the second prong of my master plan, I cornered Kendra–our one and only lawyer–before she could slip away to pick up her kids from school.

I handed her a flash drive with the HOA covenant rules. “My question is simple. Can I force the HOA to accept an application to build an aviary?”

“You are taking this personally,” said Kendra.

“I want to change the narrative from NIMBY to YIMBY.”

“YIMBY?”

“Yes, In My Back Yard.”

Kendra smiled. “I’ll go over this tonight and get back to you.”

~

A week later, I was sitting in Mrs. Topher’s living room with the finished proposal. Mrs. Topher’s décor was 1970s day-glo. It explained the clown hair. I wanted to get down to business, but Mrs. Topher wanted to play hostess. She provided fat-free, taste-free cookies and iced tea so sweetened the sugar had precipitated into the bottom of the glass. My fillings ached.

“I hear there are two avians living in your home,” said Mrs. Topher.

I’d read the rules so many times I knew that unrelated folk were frowned upon, but not live-in help. I smiled. “They provide childcare and cleaning services.”

I expected Mrs. Topher to warn me of the dangers of salmonella or something, but instead she nodded slyly. “Yes, I’ve heard the labor laws don’t apply. You don’t have to pay unemployment or match social security.” She patted me on the knee. “How smart of you. It must be nice to finally be able to afford help.”

Ripping off Mrs. Topher’s arm and beating her to death with it would not advance my agenda. Instead, I asked, “So you have no issues with bird people?”

“Not if they have a job, know their place. Of course not. I’m not a racist.”

“Excellent. I have a buyer for the rest of the subdivision.”

Mrs. Topher lit up, and not just from her spray tan.

I explained the details of how Singing Heart’s daughter would buy into the subdivision and build an aviary. “And here’s the best part, because they’ll be part of the community, they’ll pay yearly fees. It’s a win-win.”

Mrs. Topher’s face darkened like a summer thunderstorm. “It won’t pass.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll vote against it. This is a human community.”

My time at the non-profit taught me not to argue. I’d just have to go grassroots.

Mrs. Topher opened a leather slipcase and produced a typed list. “I’ll save you time. These people will vote with me no matter what. I engender loyalty that way.”

Was she bluffing? I reminded myself not to engage. I thanked her for the list and tried to let myself out, but Hercules and Atlas were loose. I had to wait until Mr. Topher corralled the two guard dogs. They were well muscled, but a little too lean. I wondered if they were actually vicious or just hungry.

~

After dinner, I made some phone calls. Mrs. Topher hadn’t bluffed. She had a solid thirty-five percent. The vote would fail. I wailed in frustration and flopped facedown into all the maps and papers I’d spread out on the table. Larry tapped the floor with one foot. I rested my chin in my hand. “Need help getting Cissie to bed?”

He typed on his controller, and the box said, “You are distressed. It is our role as men of the house to relieve that distress. How may we help?”

Just being asked made me smile. I hadn’t explained about the proposal to shield them from disappointment, but the worst had come to pass so there was no point in hiding it. I explained the situation. While doing so, Curly joined us with Cissie padding right behind, her Disney toothbrush in hand.

I pointed on the map. “The woman who lives here will vote against the proposal, and all the people on this list,” I held up the paper, “will vote with her.”

Larry touched my shoulder with a beak, a very personal gesture. “Then all is not lost. All you have to do is change one person’s mind instead of thirty. We have faith in you.”

“Of course we do, mommy.” Cissie hugged me.

Yeah. Only one.

~

After the kids were in bed and the bird people asleep, I gathered the covenant rules and binder clipped them. I found a loose page under the map of the subdivision. It outlined the rules governing utility easements. Something caught my eye. I compared the Google satellite view with the subdivision map. The original map didn’t have Mrs. Topher’s giant pool and deck. I checked the property lines, the easements, and compared it to the satellite view.

“Son of a–” I fished out two steaks from the deep freezer and shoved them into the microwave to defrost.

Twenty minutes later, dressed all in black with a measuring tape in one hand and a bag ‘o steaks in the other, I stood at the Tophers’ fence. Hercules and Atlas barreled up barking and snarling.

“Hey, boys.” I waved the steaks. “Let’s find out. Are you vicious or hungry?”

~

The next day I again sat in Mrs. Topher’s living room, suffering another glass of sludge tea.

She smiled unctuously. “You said you needed a change to the agenda?”

I’d used that as the excuse. There was no way this woman would forfeit an opportunity to gloat. “Yes.”

“Do you want to cancel the vote?”

“No. I have discovered a violation.” I leaned in. “A serious violation. The board needs to know so they can act.”

Mrs. Topher licked her lips. “Do tell.”

I handed her a manila folder. Eagerly, she flipped it open. She scowled. “This is my address.”

I grinned. “Yes, and your pool crosses into the easement by nine inches. You’ll have to rip it out.”

“I’ll get a variance.”

“That’ll take 2/3rds too. Do you think you’ll have that many friends after they find out you could’ve solved both the swamp problem and reduced their fees by allowing the aviary?”

She tossed the folder onto the coffee table. “That’s blackmail.”

“May I count on your vote and those of your friends?”

As I rounded the van to the driver’s side, Mrs. Topher released Hercules and Atlas. They bolted straight for me, but instead of mauling me, they tried to lick me to death. Disgusted, Mrs. Topher slammed her front door. Such bad doggies.

~

Two months later, the subdivision threw a party for the groundbreaking. Larry and Curly’s flight feathers had filled in and their tails were elongating. Their crests stood high and their eyes shone. By Christmas, they might be ready for their own set of leg spurs.

They followed Tyler, as he stumbled across the lawn. He’d grown into a mobile terror, squealing and clapping his hands. Seeing the three of them walk across the lawn, my heart warmed. Flocks were nice.

The ceremony had called all the displaced birds from miles around. They would all apply to become a part of the newest home nest. All but Larry and Curly, of course. First, she was their sister, and second, they’d become fully integrated into our household. I had become their mother bird.

Paul strolled over with Cissie on his shoulders. Behind them stood Mrs. Topher, her hair now a yellow-orange. She preened for a local news team. “Yes. We are a progressive neighborhood. I was instrumental in getting the permits.”

Paul nodded towards Larry and Curly. “Boy howdy, are those two working out, especially now that you’re back at the AAB.”

“Don’t get too used to it,” I said. “Soon, we might not be able to afford them.”

Paul frowned. “Why?”

“My next project is to get the bird people labor protections.”

Cissie said in her father’s ear, “Yes, daddy. Do you know what labor protections are?”

As he bee-lined to the food table, he said, “Yes, I do, Cissie. But please explain them to me anyway.”

My attention turned to three clipped birds in white button-downs and khakis who rushed toward Larry, Curly, and Tyler. The leader of the three clutched a black book. The other two clutched plastic papers, which flickered with text.

The leader squawked and the box translated, “Good day, gentle birds. We are seeking to increase our flock. Have you been saved by Jesus?”

Larry and Curly stood tall, their necks extended. In unison, they said, “Thank you, but we have already been saved, saved by Mary Magdalene.”

Ms. Mary Magdalene Farconi, a working mother, is a G-11 in the Labor Protections Department of the Alien Affairs Bureau. She supervises a governmental hotline for reporting labor abuse of Avian Nationals and is currently working with cities all over the US to design and develop aviaries within human communities.

Dr. Kathy Kitts, a former geology professor, served as a science team member on the NASA Genesis Discovery Mission. Before that, she directed a planetarium for nine years. Her latest speculative short fiction has appeared in Amazing, James Gunn’s Ad Astra, and Mad Scientist Journal. Her latest short story collection, Getting What You Need, is now available on Amazon. Born and raised in the southwest, she is currently living in the high desert of New Mexico.

Leigh’s professional title is “illustrator,” but that’s just a nice word for “monster-maker,” in this case. More information about them can be found at http://leighlegler.carbonmade.com/.

“Jehovah’s Feathers” is © 2019 K. Kitts Art accompanying story is © 2019 Leigh Legler

Fiction: Jehovah’s Feathers was originally published on Mad Scientist Journal

[therumbellehappyendingaward-blog]

Chapter 5 writer: @mariequitecontrarie

PROMPT: TRUTH

AO3: HERE

“Mr. and Mrs. Gold. And Gideon.” Surprise wrinkling his forehead, Mr. Dove stepped out of the doorway. He waved a meaty hand, ushering them through the open door, into the sparse, white living room of a modest home.

Gideon shifted and shook his head. It felt like they were in the center of the Doctor Strange movie, when the Sorcerer had used the time stone. They’d stepped in the front door, Mr. Dove had smiled and hugged him, and it had felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket. But now they were walking in the front door again? His head hurt and his throat felt scratchy. This wasn’t right.

“Is anything wrong, sir?” Dove asked Papa in a quiet voice. “Did I forget to water the hydrangea bushes?” Mr. Dove turned to Mum, his gaze lowered to the floor. “Mrs. Gold, I’m sorry, your father isn’t here and I’ve not seen him.”

What the …? Gideon stared at Mr. Dove in open-mouthed shock. Those were the most words he had ever heard him speak at once. Also he was confused. Why was he talking to Papa about watering plants? Didn’t Mr. Dove own a candy shop now? Just the other day, Papa had bought him a bag of his favorite red licorice whips and a half pound of chocolates for Mum. Or had it been caramels for Mum and sour worms for him? Suddenly he couldn’t remember. Thinking was making his head pound.

Mum took a deep breath, her shoulders shaking. She was nervous, Gideon realized, but she was going to be brave anyway, like the hero she’d named him after. His tummy jumped with expectation. He loved the idea of having more grandparents.

“Dove, I need to ask you a question,” Belle said, searching the other man’s eyes. “Are you my father?”

Gideon blinked. Mr. Dove ran a hand over his bald white scalp and for a moment the white continued down the front of his body, replacing Mr. Dove’s somber black suit with a stark white coat. Gideon rubbed his eyes and the white coat went away, the entire room turning reassuringly brighter in return.

Mr. Dove shook his head. “That’s not why you’re here.”

“It is,” Mum insisted, glancing at Papa. Papa took a step closer to her and put a reassuring arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into his embrace. “I need answers. We all do. Blue said…”

“The Blue Fairy? And you believed her? Fairies are liars, Mrs. Gold.” Mr. Dove’s eyes grew huge, black and beady, like the bird he was named after. He laughed shrilly, the high-pitched sound an unnatural contrast to his quiet, rumbling voice. “You of all people should recognize the truth of that. You’re a fairy, too,” he said, his dark, piercing eyes pinning Papa and then Gideon. “You’re all fairies!” he cried.

Mum bit her lip. “Please, Dove... who will teach me to fly?”

Frightened, Gideon backpedaled toward the door and covered his ears to block out the terrible shrieking sounds Mr. Dove was making. He clenched his eyes closed, wishing he was young enough to believe that if he couldn’t see them, he could be somewhere else—anywhere else. An image of a cage flashed into his mind and bile rose in his throat. Mr. Dove’s shrieks sounded like black rage, or gut-wrenching sobs, or maybe it was his mother crying? Gideon forced his eyes open. Papa stood as still as a statue with his head cocked, watching Mr. Dove taunt Mum and laugh in her face. Why wasn’t he throwing a fireball or casting a spell? Anything to stop those horrible noises!

Gideon pressed himself up against the wall and tried to think. If only he could remember one of the spells Papa was teaching him, he could end this.  He jammed his forefingers into his temples and tried to concentrate, but nothing came out of his mouth but silent cries.

He was frozen; he couldn’t move, he couldn’t scream. He wanted to call out to his Papa, to beg for help, for Papa to make everything better like he always did but he couldn’t make a sound. The world swirled, the edges of the room turning fuzzy.

“Liars!” Dove screeched again.

Liars, liars, liars, liars....

xoxo

Gideon struggled against the darkness, desperate to open his eyes.

He couldn’t seem to wake up. His eyelids felt like they were glued shut with the thick, sticky lanolin Papa used in the shop for waterproofing. The pungent odor of antiseptic pinched his nostrils. At last he pried his eyes open, blinking up at a cracked white ceiling. “Is the asparagus burned?” he blurted. “Did I ruin dinner?”

Every muscle in his body complained and his breath rushed out in a whoosh. His lungs felt tight, like the day he’d fallen from the top of the bleachers at the park and had the wind knocked out of him.

“Asparagus?” Papa’s face swam into view. Dark circles wreathed his eyes; he looked like he needed a nap. “Son, that was two days ago.”

Black and grey whiskers covered the lower half of his father’s face and Gideon blinked again. “When did you grow a beard?”

An amused glint entered Papa’s eyes, banking the worry lodged there. He scratched at his hairy cheek. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Rip van Winkle. You gave us quite a scare.”

“What?” Gideon struggled onto his elbows, sending pillows careening to the floor as he tried to sit up. “Where’s Mr. Dove? I thought he would hug me and smile at me, but instead he was mean.”

“Lay back, Gideon,” said a familiar, no-nonsense voice. Mum. Her smile was strained but gentle as she leaned over him from the opposite side of the bed. She pressed a cool cloth to his forehead, the soft fabric soothing against his damp, prickly skin. “Don’t try to talk all at once.”

He glanced around the room noting the television mounted on the wall opposite the bed, instead of shelves lined with bookcases. Nope, this was definitely not his bedroom at home.

“Where are we?” he managed to ask.

“Storybrooke General Hospital,” Mum said, and he felt her slight weight dip the edge of the mattress as she sat on the corner and smoothed the blankets. “After we finished making dinner the other night, you ate three bites and went straight to bed. You were burning up during the night and Doctor Whale said we should bring you here. You’ve been asleep for almost two full days.”

“Let’s have Doctor Whale check you out, then how about some ice cream?” Papa asked with a smile.

xoxo

“Now, what’s all this about Mr. Dove?” Mum asked, after a nurse with Dalmatian puppies all over her shirt had checked his temperature, listened to his breathing, and examined his eyes.  

While licking a cherry popsicle—his third—Gideon revealed the entire bizarre dream, from Papa and Mama proving they were his parents, to Grandma Colette losing her fairy wings, to confronting Blue, to the three of them showing up on Mr. Dove’s doorstep demanding to know if he was Mum’s father.

At the mention of fairy wings, Mum and Papa shared a glance and Gideon felt color rise in his cheeks. It sounded silly when he said it out loud, especially because he knew Papa and fairies didn’t mix. He hadn’t meant to have such a weird dream! He didn’t know why he had. The cloying sweetness of the popsicle was suddenly too much and his stomach roiled.

“Dove owned a candy store?” Papa mused, pacing up and down the foot of Gideon’s hospital bed. “Strange. I can’t picture him chatting up children and selling Pez dispensers and chocolate bars.”

“So none of it was real?” Crestfallen, Gideon looked between his parents, the unappetizing popsicle dripping down his hand. His heart hurt, a bit like when he was hungry and his tummy was empty. He felt like he’d lost something, like there was a hole inside him. The dream had been so vivid and he’d been convinced that he, Mum, and Papa were working together to solve a great mystery … and find more family. “Grandpa Moe really is your father?”

“Well, the part where Robin Mills was unable to keep her mouth shut and mind her own business happened,” Papa said wryly and crossed his arms. “Like mother like daughter. As for the rest of it? No. I’m sorry, son.”

Memories flooded back to Gideon. Robin calling him a bastard, and the other kids in his class laughing at him, calling him Giddy the Green Giant and saying Mum and Papa were long-lost dwarves. He remembered running home in a blind rage and locking the door against his parents and Papa trying to coax him downstairs with cookies. After that, everything was fuzzy.

Mum’s smile was full of understanding. “Mr. Dove is a kind man,” she said, whisking away the melting popsicle and offering him a sip of water. “When we don’t feel confident in who we are, it can be tempting to look elsewhere for answers. Maybe you imagined Mr. Dove was your grandfather because you know there’ve been difficulties between Grandpa Moe and Papa and me. Dove is someone Papa has worked with for years. He trusts him—we all do—but he’s definitely not my father.”

“Robin Mills.” Papa was still grumbling to himself and pacing the length of the room. “Who does she think she is, anyway? As if the circumstances of her peculiar birth and parentage are anything to take pride in?”

Mama’s brows drew together in a warning glance, and for once it wasn’t directed at him. “Rumple,” she said crisply, “that’s for Robin’s mother to discuss with her. It’s not our place, and two wrongs don’t make a right, do they?”

Even he knew Mum wasn’t looking for an answer to her question.

“Hmmph,” Papa said, leaning on his cane with a smirk.

Their lighthearted bickering comforted him and he giggled.

“There’s a welcome sound,” Papa said. He leaned over to ruffle his hair, and Gideon grinned.

“I do love Grandpa Moe. I don’t even mind when he makes me spread smelly mulch in the garden or make boring rose bouquets in the store,” Gideon said. “But he doesn’t like you, does he, Papa? It’s nothing he says or does,” he rushed to assure his parents. “I can just tell and it makes me sad. How can you care about someone and still not like their choices?”

“You have such a tender, loving heart, Gideon,” Papa said. “Like your mother.”

“Oh, Gideon. There are times I struggle with Grandpa Moe being my father,” Mum confessed. “He’s hurt me and he’s been unfair to your Papa. I’ve forgiven him for his mistakes, but forgetting is another matter. But if he ever does anything to hurt you, I want you to tell us right away, all right?”

Gideon twisted on the damp pillow. His neck felt sweaty. “It’s more than that,” he insisted. He knew his father’s parents, Malcolm and Fiona, were evil and he’d heard the stories of how Papa had done away with them for good. But Grandma Colette had died long before Papa and Mum had even met. He thought of the framed black and white photograph of her that Mama kept on her bedroom dresser. Sometimes he would go in his parents’ room and run his fingers over the silver frame and wonder what it would feel like to have a grandmother. The empty feeling inside came rushing back. Was it possible to miss someone you’d never met? “What about Grandma Colette? We never talk about her. Why?”

Mum ducked her head and bit her lip. “We should talk about this when you’re feeling better, Gideon.”

"Muuuuum," Gideon whined. “I hate when you guys keep secrets.”

Papa nudged her. “He is dreaming about it,” he said, “and dreams are of course manifestations of what is going on in the subconscious.”

“Yeah,” said Gideon, crossing his arms over his chest. “Besides, there’s no such thing as being too sick to hear the truth.”

“I hate when you both are right,” Mum muttered, but she was smiling again as she said the words. Then her smile faded and her eyes brimmed with tears. “I suppose I don’t talk about my mother much because I don’t like to think about my grief or my failings. I’ve always blamed myself for her death in the Ogres War. For a while, I couldn’t even remember how she died. I’ve tried to recover my memories from that day, but sometimes looking for answers costs more than learning the truth is worth.”

“I’m not trying to make you sad,” Gideon pleaded. He hated when Mum cried. “I just want to know what she was like.”

Mum scooted backward on the bed and put her arm around him. He leaned against her, letting her take his weight, and sighed. Papa pulled a chair closer to his bed and sat down.

“Mother was a fine scholar,” Mum said. “Smart, confident, and bookish.” Mum tapped his nose with her index finger. “You remind me of her, you know. She always taught me to be brave, and I always tried to follow her example.”

He lifted his head from her shoulder. “Like Gideon in Her Handsome Hero?”

A tear rolled down Mum’s cheek. “Yes, it was the first book she ever read to me.”

“And you decided to name me Gideon?”

She laughed, a low wet sound, and smiled at Papa. “A few other things happened before that. I had to meet and marry Papa first.”

“It doesn’t matter what the circumstances of a person’s birth is, Gideon,” Papa said. “After my mother cut me off from my destiny, I had to learn this truth myself. And after hundreds of years—and a lot of help from your mother—I finally did. Parenting has little to do with our DNA or a piece of paper declaring our bloodline.”

“Listen to your father.” Mum nodded. “It doesn’t matter if someone grows up in the care of biological parents or adoptive ones. And as for Storybrooke, it doesn’t matter what Robin Mills or anyone else believes about our family. All that matters is the love we share and the family we create. That’s all the proof of parentage you need.”

“Yes, Mum,” he said, resigned. They were right, he knew. Mum and Papa loved him and he didn’t have to prove it to anyone.

“Cheer up, Giddy,” Mum said, “You’re going to be out of the hospital tomorrow morning. Her eyes began to dance with excitement. “We haven’t gone on any adventures in a while, have we Rumple?”

“No, you’re right, sweetheart. We haven’t.”

“Once Gideon is completely well, perhaps we should return to our travels and visit my homeland in the Enchanted Forest? Gideon could continue his studies with me and we could learn more about Grandma Colette and her life.”

Gideon’s heart leapt. He loved visiting new places and getting to see where his Mama grew up was like a dream come true. Papa’s brow furrowed and his Mum shrugged, a light blush dusting her cheeks.

“Belonging,” Mum said, as if that answered everything. His Papa nodded, the lines between his eyebrows smoothing, but now it was his turn to be confused. Mum squeezed his hand. “You’ve grown up in this realm but you’ve always known your Papa and I came from the Enchanted Forest. We’ve told you stories, but it’s not the same as seeing the place for yourself.”

“I think it’s a fine idea, Belle,” Papa said. “Gideon, what do you say to a new adventure?”

“Please!” Gideon blurted, his mind racing. “Will we get to ride horses? Henry says all knights ride horses.”

“So you want to be a knight, do you?” Mum teased.

Papa’s smile was indulgent. “I’m sure we can manage something. After you get some more rest.”

Gideon yawned and pouted in annoyance. He did not want to go to sleep again. His eyes were growing heavy but he’d only woken up a few minutes ago. It wasn’t fair! His tummy twisted. Now that he was wide awake, the dream seemed silly but those helpless feelings were still there. He didn’t want to feel that way ever again. He bit his lip and fixed his eyes on his parents—his heroes.

“Where’s Cal?” he asked, giving into the pull of sleep. Mama had given him Cal, his teddy bear, when he was born. Cal was short for Excalibur because it protected him when Papa wasn’t home. “Will you get him from my room? And stay with me while I sleep?”

“Of course.” Papa snapped his fingers and Cal appeared in a puff of red smoke, then Papa tucked the tattered little brown bear under the covers.

“Can I hear the story again?” Gideon asked, his eyelids drooping. “The one where you met.”

Mum pressed a kiss to his forehead. “Once upon a time, a beast took a girl prisoner…”

THE END

[patriotsnet]

How Many Black Republicans Are In The House Of Representatives

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-black-republicans-are-in-the-house-of-representatives/

How Many Black Republicans Are In The House Of Representatives

Democrats Also Fell Short On Many Offensive Targets

More House Republicans Head For The Exits | The Last Word | MSNBC

House Democrats set out on an ambitious agenda to flip many Republican-controlled seats, particularly in Texas and in many suburban districts around the country.

But Democrats have failed, so far, to flip a single GOP-held seat other than Georgia’s 7th Congressional District, located in the Atlanta suurbs, and two North Carolina seats that they were virtually guaranteed to flip because of court-ordered redistricting, according to DDHQ projections.;

Democrats will not pick up competitive US House seats in Texas’ 2nd, 3rd, 10th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, or 24th congressional districts, DDHQ projected.

While Biden is projected to carry Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District’s sole Electoral College vote, the Democratic candidate Kara Eastman failed in her second bid to unseat the district’s congressional representative, Don Bacon, in this Omaha-based seat.

Also in the Midwest, GOP Rep. Ann Wagner won reelection in her district located in suburban St. Louis, over the Democratic candidate Jill Schupp. The Republican Victoria Spartz defeated the Democrat Christina Hale in the open race for Indiana’s 5th District, a wealthy seat in suburban Indianapolis that Democrats saw as a possible pickup opportunity.

In Michigan, the Republican Peter Meijer defeated the Democrat Hillary Scholten to succeed the retiring Rep. Justin Amash. And GOP Rep. Steve Chabot held off a challenge from the Democrat Kate Schroder in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District, located in the Cincinnati area.

Impact Of The Secessionist Movement

In the wake of the declared secession of South Carolina from the Union on December 20, 1860, many Southern House members, mostly Democrats, refused to take their seats, rejecting the election of Lincoln as illegitimate. Before 1872, different states held elections at various times; the first elections for the 37th Congress were held on August 6, 1860 in Arkansas and Missouri, while the last election took place in California on September 4, 1861, a year later. Three Southern states Arkansas, Florida, and South Carolina chose Representatives before the presidential election, electing seven Democrats and two independents. These were the only House elections from the seceding states to the 37th Congress. After South Carolina resolved disunion and the Confederate States of America was formed, other Southern states declared as well and elected Representatives to the new Congress of the Confederate States instead of the United States Congress.

Since the states not holding elections had many strong Democratic districts in the previous 36th Congress their Representatives included a total of 46 Democrats, 14 Oppositionists, five independents, and one member of the American Party when Congress was called into session on July 4, 1861 the size of the Democratic House caucus had been drastically reduced, resulting in a huge Republican majority.

Tim Scott Only Black Gop Senator Set To Respond To Biden

WASHINGTON Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator, is often happy to dart past Capitol Hill reporters without saying much. This time, he and the spotlight have found each other.

Brought up by a single mother who worked backbreaking hours as a nursing assistant, the 55-year-old Scott has spent a decade in Congress representing South Carolina. Now, the lawmaker who combines a willingness to address racial questions with an advocacy of vintage conservative themes such as opportunity and optimism is giving his partys nationally televised response to President Joe Bidens Wednesday night address to Congress.

Scott also is the lead GOP negotiator as the two parties seek an accord on legislation overhauling police procedures. The issue has long eluded compromise despite national attention fanned by last years killing of George Floyd, a Black man, and this months conviction of a former Minneapolis police officer in his slaying.

You figure out who your audience is, you figure out what you want to say and you try and find a way to say it well, Scott told reporters Tuesday about his speech preparations. And you lean into who you are.

GOP leaders choíce of Scott to answer Biden comes at a tense political moment.

Scott, from North Charleston, South Carolina, nearly dropped out of high school. He tells of a life-changing turnabout after befriending a businessman who became a mentor and stressed the value of hard work.

Also Check: How Many Republicans Are Registered In The Us

Changes To House Rules

After Democrats took control of the House in the 116th Congress, they voted to change some rules from the previous session of Congress when Republicans were in control. Some of the changes appear below.

PAYGO: Democrats approved PAYGO, a provision that requires legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset by spending cuts or revenue increases.

Ethics: Democrats made changes to House ethics rules that required all House members to take ethics training, not just new members. The rules also required members to reimburse taxpayers for settlements that that result from a members discrimination of someone based on race, religion, sex, national origin, or disability, among other things. Lawmakers were also prohibited from sitting on corporate boards.

Climate change committee: Democrats created a new climate change committee to address the issue. The committee was not given subpoena power or the ability to bring bills to the floor.

A full explanation of the rules changes can be viewed here.

Bipartisan ‘bromance’ Blossoms As 2 Texas Congressmen Make Dc Road Trip

Hurd was also one of just four House Republicans who voted for a resolution to condemn Trump’s racist tweets last month attacking four freshman Democratic women of color. His positions and willingness to speak out against Trump made sense, given the political and demographic makeup of his district. The 23rd District is almost 70% Latino, and Hillary Clinton won it by about 3.5 percentage points in 2016. Last year’s midterm elections left Hurd as one of just three House Republicans to sit in a district carried by Clinton, not Trump.

But Hurd only barely survived in 2018 to win reelection by just 926 votes over Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force veteran who had already announced she was seeking a rematch in 2020. Without Hurd, who was seen by Republicans and Democrats alike as an unusually strong GOP incumbent, the Cook Political Report has moved its rating for this seat from Toss Up to Lean Democratic.

You May Like: How Many Registered Democrats And Republicans In The Us

How Black Republicans Are Debunking The Myth Of A Voter Monolith

African American politicians and activists on the right say theyve found support in the black community through dialogue

For Brad Mole, venturing into Republican politics didnt start with a sudden awakening to conservatism. It was his religious upbringing and way of life that brought him to the Republican party.

My faith pushed me more toward policies that better reflected my upbringing, he said. I began understanding that the teachings I was raised with were more reflected in a party that not many around me identified with.

The son of a preacher in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina, Mole is now taking his politics a giant leap forward, challenging the Democrat Joe Cunningham for his US congressional seat.

As analysts debunk the myth of the black voter monolith, some black Republicans are stepping forward to counter stereotypes and assert a political identity very different from the usual assumption that all black Americans are Democrats, especially in the era of Donald Trump.

As one of seven Republicans running for the seat, Mole credits his religious background for his motivations to join the crowded race. Those same traditions are often associated with centrist African American political leanings. But for black Americans like Mole, their conservatism leads some to question whether their political party and preferences actually match their worldview.

But hes not out to change minds; he wants rebuild a sense of community.

An Incoming Class Of History

Several of the newly elected state representatives are making history.;

The Republican Madison Cawthorn, 25, who beat the Democrat Moe Davis to represent North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, will become the youngest member of Congress in modern history.

The Democrat Cori Bush is set to become the first Black congresswoman from Missouri after winning in the state’s 1st Congressional District.

The Democrats Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres will also be the first openly gay Black men to serve in Congress, after winning in New York’s 17th and 15th districts respectively.

And nine out of the eleven Republicans who have so far unseated incumbent Democrats are women wins that will drastically expand the representation of women and especially of women of color in the House Republican caucus.

Currently, there are just 13 voting female Republican representatives in the House and 11 female Republican incumbents who ran for reelection in 2020.

Don’t Miss: Did Trump Ever Say Republicans Are Stupid

And 1867 United States House Of Representatives Elections

1866 and 1867 United States House of Representatives elections

;

Elections to the United States House of Representatives were held in 1866 to elect Representatives to the 40th United States Congress.

The elections occurred just one year after the American Civil War ended when the Union defeated the Confederacy.

The 1866 elections were a decisive event in the early Reconstruction era, in which PresidentAndrew Johnson faced off against the Radical Republicans in a bitter dispute over whether Reconstruction should be lenient or harsh toward the vanquished South.

Most of the congressmen from the former Confederate states were either prevented from leaving the state or were arrested on the way to the capital. A Congress consisting of mostly Radical Republicans sat early in the Capitol and aside from the delegation from Tennessee who were allowed in, the few Southern Congressmen who arrived were not seated.

A Candid Conversation With Eight Women Of Color Running For Congress This Year

J.C. Watts Says African American Republicans Tried To Reach White House | MTP Daily | MSNBC

Gore is running against Democratic incumbent Rep. Marcia Fudge, who has represented Ohio’s solidly blue 11th Congressional District since 2008 — a majority Black urban area.

“Maybe the candidacies aren’t taken seriously because typically we don’t get the Black vote. And sometimes we don’t get the white vote, you know? So we’re kind of in a bit of a quagmire,” Gore said, reflecting on her challenges to fundraise.

Klacik, a former Democrat who voted for Barack Obama, faces an incredibly steep climb in a reliably blue urban district, which includes parts of Baltimore. She is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who was sworn in earlier this year after the death of Rep. Elijah Cummings in October 2019. Cummings held that seat since 1996.

“I get called names all the time for being a Black Republican. Meanwhile, my whole push is to make it better in the Black community,” Klacik said, criticizing Democratic politicians for a lack of investment in the inner cities.

Asked what advice she has for other Republicans of color who face similar backlash, Klacik urged them not to be discouraged.

“People are always gonna either love you or hate you,” she said. “You’ve got to fight for what’s right.”

The primary ‘is our biggest place of hurt’

Compared to an expansive network of Democratic organizations built over the last few decades to support female candidates, there are only a few Republican groups working specifically to boost the campaigns of Republican women.

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Th United States Congress

Features of Congress Background 116th 115th 114th 113th 112th 111th 110th Analysis

The 116th Congress convened on January 3, 2019, and concluded on January 3, 2021.

Republicans controlled the Senate, and Democrats controlled the House.

Sen. Mitch McConnell was Senate majority leader, and Sen. John Thune was Senate majority whip. Sen. Chuck Schumer was Senate minority leader, and Sen. Dick Durbin was Senate minority whip.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi served as the speaker of the House. Rep. Steny Hoyer was House majority leader, and Rep. Jim Clyburn was House majority whip. Rep. Kevin McCarthy was House minority leader, and Rep. Steve Scalise served as House minority whip.

President Donald Trump issued nine vetoes during the 116th Congress. For more information on vetoes issued during the Trump administration, .

The House and Senate were expected to be in session for fewer days in 2019 than they were in 2018. The Senate was scheduled to meet for 168 days in 2019, and the House was scheduled to meet for 130 days. In 2018, the Senate met for 186 days, while the House met for 171. From 2001 to 2018, the Senate spent an average of 165 days in session each year, and the House spent an average of 140 days in session.

New members of Congress were elected on . For more information on the 2018 House and Senate elections, click here.

Number Of House Members Per State

Unlike the U.S. Senate, which consists of two members from each state, the geographic makeup of the House is determined by the population of each state. The only stipulation spelled out in the U.S. Constitution comes in Article I, Section 2, which guarantees each state, territory or district at least one representative.

The Constitution also states that there can be no more than one representative in the House for every 30,000 citizens.

The number of representatives each state gets in the House of Representatives is based on population. That process, known as reapportionment, occurs every 10 years after the decennial population count conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

U.S. Rep. William B. Bankhead of Alabama, an opponent of the legislation, called the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 “an abdication and surrender of vital fundamental powers.” One of the functions of Congress, which created the census, was to adjust the number of seats in Congress to reflect the number of people living in the United States, he said.

Also Check: What Do Republicans And Democrats Believe In

The ‘quagmire’ Facing Black Republican Women Who Run For Congress

Only one Black Republican woman has even been elected to Congress.

A candid conversation with eight women of color running for Congress this year

Only one Black Republican woman has ever held a seat in Congress — Mia Love, who represented Utah’s 4th Congressional District from 2015 to 2019. But it’s not because Black Republican women don’t run.

A record number of women of color from both the Democratic and the Republican parties ran for Congress in 2020 — and a record number won their primaries, according to an analysis by Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.

Out of the 115 nominees for U.S. House, 82 are Democrats and 33 are Republicans, with nominations for Black women at 61 — a record high.

But based on an ABC News analysis of data from The Cook Political Report, it is unlikely that these runs will translate to a significant change in representation in Congress — particularly for Republican women, largely because those candidates are not competing in toss-up or competitive races.

Vivian Childs, Laverne Gore and Kimberly Klacik — all Black Republicans — launched campaigns in urban Democratic strongholds across the country in the hopes of winning a seat in Congress.

In interviews with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” they each described feeling alone in their primary races and expressed frustration over the lack of support from their own party. They urged the GOP to reach out to candidates and voters of color.

Battling a ‘vicious circle’

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[greathaven]

[Schazer: Magic.]

You don't know how to answer that. It's not that you don't know the obvious answer - it's how you fear she would react. Who knows what the people here think of magic? If anything was a curse at your old den, it was the stigma... and you're still not sure what to think of it yourself. So you decide to start with the smaller stuff, and take a step backward from the sword's tip. "...I'll be honest," you say, "I don't have a lot of experience, but... I was always real good at hide and seek, and I can make a good snowhiir." Rye looks unimpressed, and lowers her sword to see if there were others waiting for her to be distracted. She doesn't bother to stand up. You didn't come all this way to be trapped in a place like this, so you brace yourself and add, "I can use magic pretty well, too." She sighs. "That doesn't sound particularly special. Anyone can throw sparks, you know." She demonstrates by snapping little arcs of electricity between her digits. Now comes the moment of truth. "Just yesterday," you continue, "I took down a rozo by myself. One zap, and he was out." "Please. You're a bad liar." She swishes her tail behind her and yawns, eyes heavy as though she wanted to go back to sleep. "Hmm. But at least you're not cocky about it." She scratched her chin in thought. "...I'll tell you what. If you can show me you're as powerful as you say, then I'll let you down to see the chieftains with Farragus." You choke a little as you speak. "...I don't actually have a lot of control over it. And I don't want to hurt you." "So what I'm hearing is, you don't have any evidence for it?"

[Smurfton: Try not to exaggerate.]

Beating around the bush doesn't seem to help your case, and you're getting tired of not being taken seriously. At least, being a magic user doesn't seem to hold the same weight here as it did back home. It's at this moment that you realize you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. So you tell her everything. "...Okay. I don't even want to be a scout." You note the change of tone in your voice. "I was about to buy a tunic earlier today, with money that I got for knocking out that rozo. I had... I had over ten thousand spice given to me, and then taken away, today. And now I'm here. ...I just wanna find the toril who still has it, before they leave town." You pause, feeling a familiar dryness in your throat. "...I'd do anything," you say, "to find her." She did save your life, after all.

Rye stands up with a look of grim curiosity. "...Okay. Let's say what you're telling me is true, and let's say we find that torill. What are you going to do after?" Her stance reminds you of your small stature. "...I'll give the clan some of the money, and then I'll be on my way." "...And how much money did you say you had?" "I had eighty-seven hundred spice, when I lost it," you say.

Suddenly, a there is a familiar ringing in your ears. The source is obvious this time; Rye is talking to the chieftains. "Ahem. Rohan, this is Rye. You guys happened to find a small bag while you were out there, didn't you?" There is a delay, until another voice comes from somewhere far beneath you. "Yeees, yes, this is Rohan. We have the one. This had better be good, Rye." "I have an important question," she responds. "Did you find it in the sea?" "Yes, we did," came the other voice again. "And just about how many guards did you kill to get it?" There is another delay, about ten seconds long - and a slight stirring in the air as the other hiiri start to wake up. The crowd outside was one thing, but this was kind of hard to ignore. Finally, a third voice pierces the darkness. "This is Moe. I counted there to be seven yellow ones, and eight purple ones." Rye takes a deep breath, and sighs. "...It appears that bag belongs to the young one you found wandering outside, and he wants to be a scout to get it back." "What?" says a voice, which you recognize as Felna's. And then there is a long, long silence.

Growing impatient, she steps aside. "Just go down, already," she says out loud, preparing herself to fend off the small crowd gathering nearby. "The rest of you can back off." You just follow your orders.

____

The way down is pretty straightforward, although it's dark, even for a hiir. But at least you can catch the bends in the path before you run into them. Sometimes the floor gets steeper, or a wooden frame lines the walls... and you only seem to take left turns. The voices of chieftains arguing about you bounce around in your head, and you are tempted to tell them all to shut up - but you know better, and instead flatten your ears to try and quiet them. You are really glad telling the truth seemed to work; you aren't particularly proud of some of the things you would have tried otherwise. Eventually, you see a light...

...And find yourself in a quaint little room. Upon seeing you, the Hawren standing over the group shakes his head. "What on earth is going on? Why won't you guys tell me anything?" You definitely recognize the rest, but you don't know their names. Someone who looks like Felna is sitting in the back, but you can tell it isn't her. The first one to speak among them, the grey one, must be Moe. "...Hello again," he says, pulling on his scarf. Everyone else just stares at you, like they don't know what to say. ...You don't really know what to say, either.

[khalilhumam]

Federal breakdowns are accelerating

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/federal-breakdowns-are-accelerating/

Federal breakdowns are accelerating

By Paul C. Light The Trump administration has made little effort to honor the president’s promises to make government work. Employee morale is down, public distrust is up, and the swamp has never been so vibrant. Americans know trust in the federal government has declined, believe it is affecting government’s ability to act, blame government performance for a substantial share of the decline, and even say it should be repaired. At the same time, Americans say the federal government gets the respect it deserves.[1] The failure to address the need for government reform feeds the cycle of disappointment that threatens the nation. As my colleagues, Will Howell and Terry Moe argue in Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, Trump’s rise to power is more a symptom than a cause of the current populist crisis. New policies for economic and social renewal would help stem the threat, but such renewal would only succeed with a return to the faithful execution of the laws. Hence, Howell and Moe’s call to reform includes a long list of standard bureaucratic reforms such as reducing the number of political appointees and strengthening the civil service.[2] Trust in government is also related to demographic, economic, and social change, but appears to be highly responsive to government breakdowns. Even if an occasional breakdown can be justified as the price of ambition, the recent acceleration creates a sense that the federal government cannot be trusted to meet minimal expectations for reliability and care. The sluggish response to COVID-19 will long be remembered as one of the federal government’s greatest breakdowns, but it also triggered a cascade of smaller breakdowns as beleaguered agencies struggled to perform seemingly simple tasks such as printing and mailing stimulus checks to people. Moreover, breakdowns often return to the front page when blue-ribbon investigations, court cases, histories, and even books about the government’s greatest failures reach the news again. Past breakdowns and the failures to fix the underlying problems are also relitigated when new breakdowns are triggered by the same or similar causes. (Read through the 70 post-2001 breakdowns here and the COVID-19 crisis becomes a failure foretold by previous failures.[3]) These include the failure of imagination that led to the 9/11 attacks, the depleted supply-chain that undermined the response to Hurricanes Katrina and Maria, the “pervasive permissiveness” toward risky financial industry behaviors that sparked the Great Recession, the denial that preceded the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, and the overpromising that turned what should have been the agile launch of the Obamacare website into a nightmare of frozen screens. The total number of highly-visible breakdowns may seem small, but it accelerated as the federal bureaucracy strained to do more with less, with aging government systems and political turmoil. The pre-2001 administrations averaged just 1.4 breakdowns per year from 1986-2000, while the post-2001 administrations have averaged 3.5 to date. Compared administration-to-administration, the Trump administration has more than tripled the number of breakdowns in George H.W. Bush’s first and only term, while the three post-2001 presidents have more than doubled their predecessors. Figure 1 shows the number of breakdowns by presidential administration. The rising number of highly-visible breakdowns is almost certainly tied to media polarization.  Government breakdowns under Democratic control may have produced higher ratings at Fox, just as breakdowns under Republican control may have been a boon for MSNBC and CNN, both of which could be fueling greater public interest in stories about failure. Notwithstanding the partisan incentives that might underpin the pursuit of visibility at CNN, Fox, or MSNBC, there is good reason to blame decades of neglect for the increase, be it in the failure to upgrade government management systems, the desperate need for civil service reform, the death of government reorganization as a tool for increasing efficiency, the budgetary cliff-diving that led to shutdowns and annual uncertainty, and the bureaucratic layers discussed in the fourth piece of this series. As Figure 1 shows, the same data tell a different story when they are divided into breakdowns per year. Suddenly, what looks like a peak during the Obama administration turns into an steady rise from 1.6 breakdowns per year during Reagan’s second term to 4.3 breakdowns per year under Trump. Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his team would be well advised to note the recent acceleration in the number of breakdowns per year—and be reminded of those that occurred during his tenure as vice president. The acceleration makes the Trump administration more vulnerable to criticism, but also should raise warnings about overpromising in the absence of a government reform agenda—something Mr. Trump did during the 2016 campaign and as president and Mr. Biden is doing in the 2020 campaign. President Trump has himself to blame for any backlash against his long list of first-term government breakdowns. Having reassured his party in 2016 that he “alone could fix it,” Trump showed little interest in doing so. Administrative experts may disagree on how Trump set a record in first-term breakdowns, but he alone must claim it. Absent action to repair the underlying causes of failure that each president inherits, the blame goes to the incumbent.

[1] Seventy-five percent of the Americans interviewed by the Pew Research Center in December, 2018, 64% said low trust in the federal government made it harder to solve problems, 36% volunteered in written open-ended answers that the federal government’s performance, or the lack thereof was to blame for the decline, and 68% said it was very important to repair the decline. See Lee Rainie and Andrew Perrin, “Key findings about Americans declining trust in government and each other,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2019. [2] William G. Howell, and Terry M. Moe, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020; see also the 2019 Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy for a review of the data and effects, [3] In my list of highly visible government breakdowns, I build on the defunct Pew Research Center News Interest Index. Launched in 1986, the original index was designed to track public attention to “stories in the news” over time. Respondents were read a list of stories covered by news organizations in a specific period and asked whether they followed each of the stories on the list very closely, fairly closely, not closely, or not at all closely. The question was first used by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press in July 1986 and remained in the queue when the Times Mirror Center became the Pew Research Center in 1996 and remained in the inventory until a three-year hiatus began in late summer 2015. The current question asks respondents “How much, if anything, have you heard or read about each of the following stories that have been in the news recently?” I used the 1986-2015 data in my 2015 Volcker Alliance report, Vision + Execution = Faithful Execution. I reconstructed the Pew survey question to the extent I could by compiling lists of major news stories such as the AP’s annual survey of U.S. editors and news directors. I then searched for polling data on each story and selected the most visible stories for further review. The Volkswagen emissions-testing scandal was the first news story that showed up on my list after the Pew Research Center suspended the news interest question. I began adding to the index on my own in 2010 by following high-visibility new stories that involved a federal government breakdown that was being followed very or fairly closely by at least 30 percent of respondents. I made the judgment about whether a given story revealed a significant federal government failure based on news stories, congressional investigations, and other available information about the federal role in the event. Readers should note that the recent list of breakdowns is solely based on my judgment about what constitutes a breakdown. I define a breakdown as a time-specific event that reveals an administrative failure in how the federal government executed a law. I readily accepted poorly crafted policy as a cause of such failures, but focused on execution as I read stories in the news. For example, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not cause the Boeing 737 Max accidents—the design flaws, cost-cutting, and regulatory evasion belongs to Boeing. However, as the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee recently reported, the two crashes that killed 346 people reflected a “horrific combination” of failure that included the FAA’s weak oversight and improper regulatory delegation. See Niraj Chokshi, “House Report Condemns Boeing and F.A.A. in 737 Max Disasters,” New York Times, September 16, 2020.

[mariequitecontrarie]

All of Me: Chapter 14

The Fic: Belle French is a pudgy librarian who’s in love from afar with “town monster” and ace reporter, Mr. Gold. Little does she know, he’s head-over-heels in love with her, too. Chapter Summary: Gold arrives at the Frenches for dinner. Contempt is on the menu. A/N: I promised you guys an eventful dinner with Edith and Moe. Hope this delivers. A little Grandpastiltskin and practical daughter-in-law bonding, too. Thank You: Amazing beta: @magnoliatattoo; Artwork: @wizzygold

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13

Stay with Me (between Ch 9 and 10) | Pieces of Me (Q&A)

{On AO3}

Chapter 14: Dinner

He is all lines and sharp angles I am soft curves and extra padding But it doesn't matter so much When he's holding my hand Intertwined and all jumbled up, Or when he's kissing me Closed eyes and only nerves Igniting How strange to think the knife Could learn to love the butter - Georgia Marginson-Swart

Gold rang the Frenches doorbell and clenched his cane, grinding the brass tip into the concrete. Cold beads of sweat trickled down the back of his neck and the edges of his vision began to blur. He sniffed the eucalyptus leaves in the bouquet he was holding, an attempt to open his lungs and ward off an anxiety attack. Don't panic now, Gold. Dinner with Belle’s parents was your damn idea. 

Blowing air roughly through his nose, he reminded himself why he was here.

For Belle.

Earlier, he had stopped at Emma and Neal’s house on his way, under the guise of needing a wine recommendation. His daughter-in-law had narrowed her ice blue eyes and pushed him toward the living room sofa.

Wincing, he sank onto the couch like a recalcitrant teenager, preparing for the lecture.

Henry popped out an earbud and looked up from his Kindle. “Where's grandpa going?”

“Grandpa has dinner with Belle and her parents at their house,” Emma explained. 

“Can I come? I’m awful hungry and I haven’t seen Miss Belle in daaaays.” Henry patted his stomach, which growled on command. “What’s to eat?”

Gold had shot Emma a hopeful look. Maybe she would let him bring Henry along. Even Edith French wouldn’t draw blood in front of an innocent child, would she?

Don’t be such a coward.

“We saw Belle at the park yesterday, remember?” Emma shook her head. “And no, you can’t go to dinner.”

“How come?”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Because Grandpa has to face this dragon on his own.”

Henry wrinkled his nose. “Is this like when Grandpa went to war?”

Gold covered a snort. The child was too perceptive for a five-year-old. “Eh, something like that.”

Henry nodded as if making a decision, then abandoned his game and trotted off.

Emma put her hands on her hips. “You have a thousand bottles in your wine cellar. We have a six-pack of beer in the fridge. You’re not here to ask me the difference between claret and cabernet and we both know it, so what’s this all about?” She squinted at the six bottles he’d set on the coffee table.

He shrugged, unable to explain why a simple meal with Belle’s parents seemed so much harder than other challenges he’d faced. At the moment, crouching in a bunker with bullets whizzing by his ears seemed preferable to what was ahead. “Do I need an excuse to visit with my family?”

“Of course not.” Emma tapped the bottle of Gewürztraminer. ““Belle likes this one. You’re on your own for the rest.”

She slung an arm around his shoulders and steered him toward the front door. “Remember, Dad, you’re there for Belle. To show her what it means to have her in your life. She needs you to be strong. Besides, wasn’t this family dinner your idea?”

He nodded, shaking off the sense of impending doom and straightening his spine. “Yeah.”

“Look, don’t let Edith rile you. She’s just as worried as you are. Maybe even more. Look her in the eye and stand your ground!” Emma squeezed his shoulders vigorously, then thwacked him between the shoulder blades.  

Gold yelped and rubbed his back. “That’s your sage advice? ‘Stand your ground?’”

“Exactly. The Frenches don’t have to love you, they just have to not hate your guts.” She crossed her arms and leveled him with a look, then nodded toward his car. “Now be the gentleman we both know you are and move your ass. You’re gonna be late.”

“And to think this is where I come for encouragement.” Gold smirked at his daughter-in-law and tucked the wine under his arm. He started down the walkway back to his car.

“Wait!”

Henry.

Gold turned around, and his grandson thrust a plastic sword at him. “Here you go, Grandpa.”

“Ugh!” Gold pretended to parry, then stumbled back, feigning a mortal wound. He threw up his hands. “I surrender!”

“No.” Henry rolled his eyes. “You’re supposed to take it.”

“Me? Why?” “To slay the dragon!” The child grinned. “It’s super strong, so even if she breathes fire you’ll be safe. But can you clean off the dragon guts and bring it back when you’re through? It’s my favorite.”

Gold swayed on his feet, scowling at the flowers and wine he had brought.

He braced himself against the green siding of the Frenches split-level house, taking deep breaths. Dinner with Belle’s parents had seemed like such a smart, civilized idea, but now the taste of panic coated his tongue. The wine. He’d forgotten to put it in the gift bag. Quickly he made the switch, removing it from the paper sack and dumping it in the wine bag. He crumpled the sack in his fist, and flung it into the bushes as the door opened. There stood Edith French, looking prim in a tailored navy suit.

“Good evening.” He inclined his head and offered his most benign smile, then tipped the flowers toward her. “Thank you for inviting me to your home.”

“Mr. Gold.” Her answering nod was stiff. She eyed his painstakingly-chosen cluster of peonies, roses, and hydrangea, then took a small step back, her mouth twitching. “I’m allergic to flowers.”

“I see.” He lowered the bouquet and tried again, this time whisking the wine out of the bag.

The brackets around her mouth deepened. “And we don’t drink.”

“Ah. My apologies.” He choked the neck of the bottle and ground his back teeth. Getting through this dinner was going to require all his patience.

“I drink,” offered a familiar, lilting voice. “And I love flowers.”

Belle. His heart flooded with happiness when she appeared, edging Edith out of the doorway.

All at once, the glut of tension in his stomach melted away. Seeing her was all he needed to be at ease. Belle calmed him in a way no one else ever had, and somehow he knew whatever struggles came their way, they would handle them together.

“Good evening, sir.” She accepted the bouquet, then curtsied.  

“My lady.” He bowed, then simply stared. A lace dress the color of wine accentuated her luscious curves, its scalloped, plunging neckline molding to her breasts, while the delicate fabric swished around her thighs.  “You’re stunning.”

“Do you like it?” She dipped her head with a coy smile, then peeked up at him through her lashes. “It’s new.”

Mrs. French cleared her throat.

“I’ll keep these flowers in my room, Edith.” Belle grabbed his hand and pulled him into the house. “The table’s all set for dinner; I’m taking Gold on a tour.”

She grasped his fingers and squeezed, then led him toward the staircase. He slowed down and gave her a questioning look. “I thought we were going on a tour.”

“We are. Starting upstairs.”

Her lithe fingers danced along the bannister and she tugged on his hand. Helpless to resist, he followed, admiring the gentle sway of her hips as she led him up the stairs and down a sparse hallway.

She threw open a door to a bright and colorful room festooned with pillows and fabrics, and ushered him inside. He looked around with pleasure, taking in the modest-sized space draped with blue and cream and accented with bits of sunny yellow. In the brief moments he spent in the Frenches’ foyer, he had observed a sparse, cold residence. Hard furniture with straight lines, a dearth of personal effects. There weren’t even any photos dotting the mantel.

Belle’s room was a complete contrast.

Knick knacks decorated the surfaces of shabby chic furniture. It was clean yet cluttered, bursting with books, photos of exotic destinations, decorating magazines, and whimsy. There were candles, dried flowers, and colorful ceramic bowls, all artfully arranged on every available surface.  

“Just sit anywhere,” she said lightly, then grabbed a mason jar and dashed into the hallway. There were two choices of seating: a dainty, bright yellow kitchen chair draped with clothes, or a large canopy bed. In a moment Belle was back, the jar now filled with water, and he sat down on the edge of the bed and let his cane slip to the floor.  

“You’re very relaxed tonight,” he said, admiring her aplomb as she arranged the flowers in the jar. She was in her element here, as she was in the library, her movements certain and focused.

“I’ve been drinking,” she whispered loudly, with a sly smile and a wink. She lifted a bottle of peach schnapps from the bureau and took a large swig. “Sorry about Edith. I was hoping to get to the door first, but she beat me there.” She held out the bottle. “Want some?”

“Sure.” He smiled and took a small sip of the bright, cloying orange liqueur. “Not bad.”

“My favorite.” She giggled and took another large drink. The door closed with a soft thud and he heard the sound of a lock click. Belle moved forward, coming to stand between his thighs. Her hands grazed his chest and she pushed him down on the bed, then followed. He groaned when she straddled him, one rounded hip on either side of his. She rose above him, settling her pert bottom across his thighs. The glimpse into her lush cleavage made his skin prickle with desire, and she fanned his face with her warm, peach-scented breath. “Do you want to kiss me?”

The words went straight to his groin. “Always,” he whispered on a strangled sigh.

Cupping his cheeks with both hands, she flicked out her tongue to lick at the seam of his lips. With a moan, he parted for her. Usually he was the one to initiate physical affection, but tonight, Gold relished Belle’s boldness. As her hips sunk into his, she slid her tongue in slowly, warmth and sensation spreading through his veins like remarkable whiskey. They’d kissed dozens of times since they started dating, but Belle’s mouth was always new, bright, and exciting. Tonight she tasted of ripe fruit and honey. He wondered if the rest of her skin was as sweet as her mouth, and then he couldn’t think at all as she leaned over him, pressing him deeper into the pillows. Warm lips smoothed down his jawline, nibbling and lapping at his throat.  

He reached up, gathering her lushness against him, all deep curves, persimmon-smooth skin, and silken heat. His hands wandered up the rough-smooth lace of her dress, dipping into the curve of her waist before sliding higher until the edge of his palms reached the soft, plump undersides of her breasts. Of their own accord, his hands cupped the swell of flesh, grasping and kneading, and his thumbs grazed over her stiff nipples, eliciting a soft whimper from her throat. Her small sounds and sweet, tender curves struck him like lightning, and heat permeated his body, chasing away the stress and concern from earlier; he was surrounded by Belle, all her warmth and sweetness enveloping him. Giving into his need, he canted his hips, her voluptuous friction arousing him beyond reason.  

There was a crash, then an expletive floated through the floor vent.

“Oh!” Belle’s mouth broke from his, and he lay there panting with fractured breaths. Lying in Belle’s bed, dazzled by her fragrance, was a dangerous place to be.

He watched in dizzy fascination as her cleavage flooded with color, eyes pure blue and drowsy. She giggled and their gazes locked, a singular sharing of souls known only to lovers. Belle moved slightly, her hips rolling forward, and he knew she could feel his desire. His temptress eased off his body to curve against his side, her curls tickling his chin. “My parents are downstairs. My room is right above the kitchen.”

Like two children who had been caught snatching cookies, they laughed, nervous, breathy sounds punctuated by the angry clatter of pots and pans.

His breathing returning to normal, he propped himself up on one elbow. “Do you think they heard us?” He was ecstatic to do anything Belle wanted, but he didn’t want to be a complete ass under her parents’ roof.

“I don’t care.” She shook her head, her long curls dancing around her shoulders. “I’m a grown-up person and I can make out with my hot boyfriend whenever I want.” She reached for the schnapps again.

“Sweetheart.” He stilled her hand, massaging her wrist with his thumb. “Easy on that stuff, ok? I don’t want you to have a headache later.”

“Ok.”

She nuzzled his neck and he collapsed against the bed, then slid his arm under her pillow, his hand bumping into something hard. His fingers seized a book, and he slid it out from under his head. Belle’s journal. He passed it to her like a hot potato. “Ooops. Sorry.”

She kissed his nose, then flipped through the pages like an accordion, a paper-scented breeze hitting his flushed cheeks. “Some of it’s about you,” she confided in a wide-eyed whisper. “Wanna see?”

“Are you sure you want me to read it?” he asked, still averting his eyes from the open book. He hadn’t forgotten her embarrassment when he’d accidentally perused her journal during their breakfast in the library.

Besides, he wasn’t certain he wanted to look. Belle was always hinting she found him attractive, but he didn’t share her view. His nose was large and crooked, his eyes hooded and too small for his face. Not to mention his limp. He was nothing compared to the ravishing beauty cuddled against him, a woman who was not only physically stunning, but one who had the kindest, purest heart of anyone he’d ever met.

She bit her lower lip, then licked it. “I’m sure.”

He scanned the page, then tugged at his collar. Reading her private thoughts and being this close to her ignited the fire in his belly once more, her smoldering gaze pinning him to the bed. When he read the words “delicious, tight backside,” he closed the book. “I didn’t realize you were such a colorful writer, Miss French,” he teased.

“When the subject matter is as fascinating and delightful as you are, I can be quite creative.”

“You, ah, wrote about my hair.” He raked a self-conscious hand through his cropped locks.

“Yes, when I met you it was long.” She stroked a finger down his clipped sideburn. “I remember thinking at Henry’s birthday bonfire that you looked…good. Different but good. And I wondered why you decided on such a change.”

“I did it because I wanted to look younger.” He looked down at the rumpled bedspread. “Fresh, and like someone you might want to go out with sometime.”

“You cut your hair for me?”

He nodded, still without looking at her, feeling like an ancient fool.

Belle pealed with laughter, mirth sparking in her cerulean eyes.

His mouth fell open, afraid he had said too much. God, I sound like such a creeper. Belle noticed his chagrin, and laid a comforting hand on one of his. Her other came to his chin, fingers pressing the dimple there, as she pulled his gaze to hers.

“No one has ever done anything like that for me. Changed themselves to try to please me. But you don’t have to do anything to make me notice you. Erskine, I love your long hair. I love your short hair. You look wonderful either way. To me, there’s not a more handsome man anywhere. And not only because of the way you look. I want you – all of you – your hair, your mind, your smile, your sense of humor, your hands…” she circled the pad of flesh on his palm just below his thumb and grinned. “I really love your hands.”

She stopped and closed her eyes for a moment. Patiently he waited, his heart pounding with expectation. When her eyes opened, they were blazing with intensity, a rich, blue fire, and he held his breath.

“I love you.”

Belle clasped Gold’s hand, accepting his support as they descended the stairs to dinner. She admired his profile as they entered the dining room together, his aquiline nose, his strong jaw. The more time she spent with him, the more comfortable and desirable she felt. As formal as he was in his suits, silk ties, and cufflinks studded with gemstones, everything about him put her at ease.

For some odd reason, Erskine had been delighted at the prospect of being invited to dinner. He said he wanted to know her parents better, but wasn’t that just the sort of thing good boyfriends said?

Still, she felt confident and happy when he held out her chair at the table, inviting her to sit, and took his place next to her.

“Oh!” Her father nodded in approval, then lumbered toward Edith to pull out her chair. “Good idea, Gold.”

“Mr. French, good evening.” Gold reached out to shake Moe’s hand.

Making himself useful, her father opened the wine and poured generous glassfuls for everyone but Edith.

Edith took her seat and beginning to serve the way she always did, doling out meager portions of food, like a soup kitchen running low on rations. She wasn’t happy unless she was measuring every gram down to the final grain of rice.

As the bread basket went by, Belle glanced down at her rounded tummy, the fresh, yeasty scent of baguette a subtle chiding that she didn’t need to eat at all. Edith met her eyes, giving an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Belle didn��t think it was possible for someone else’s neurosis to actually make a person fat, but Edith’s measured stare made her feel like she’d put on ten pounds just by sitting down. She let the basket pass without taking a roll.

“What were you two doing upstairs so long?” Edith dropped the serving fork and it clattered against the edge of a platter.

“Looking at books.” Belle lied blithely, eyes on her silverware.

“Dirty books.”

“What?” Belle choked on a sip of wine.

“There is lipstick on your collar, Mr. Gold.” Edith raised a judgmental eyebrow as she fanned small portions of pork tenderloin, salad, and slivers of the potato pie—Belle’s one contribution to the meal—across each dinner plate. Marco had taught her to make the combination of potatoes mashed with eggs, butter, milk, and prosciutto.

Gold looked up at Edith, surprised at the elder French woman’s lack of tact. He levelled his gaze at her, not once flinching under her stare. He was a grandfather, for God’s sake—kissing his girlfriend was no cause for shame.

“So there is,” he countered, his gaze steady, as he reached under the table to seek and squeeze Belle’s hand.

Relief flooded Belle’s chest, along with the realization that Gold wasn’t susceptible to Edith’s guilt trips wrapped in hostility. They had done nothing wrong, although the memory of his caresses did feel deliciously sinful. She sent him a grateful look.

“I’m not sure what this potato concoction is. Belle made it and she won’t tell me what’s in it.” Edith poked at her potatoes with a knife as though they might rear up and bite her.

“Sformato di patate,” Belle enunciated in Italian. “Potato pie.”

“It looks delicious.” Gold glared at Edith, and Belle gulped as the tension in the dining room escalated.

Her father, at least, seemed blissfully unaware of the contretemps as he forked large bites of everything on his plate. For a few minutes there was only the scrape of utensils against dishes as they ate in deafening silence, Belle and Gold both picking at their food while Edith sawed each bite into tiny pieces. Occasionally she allowed a bit of food to pass her lips, then chewed for long moments, her mouth twisted.

“Remember when Sean used to come for dinner and bring those health bars?” Edith speared a morsel of potato and gave it a nasty look.

Her father guffawed. “The rabbit food? Those things weren’t fit for gerbils,” Moe muttered, shoveling another large bite of potatoes laced with prosciutto into his mouth.

Belle stifled a laugh behind a mouthful of dry pork. There was a certain satisfaction in hearing her father’s true feelings on her former fiancé. She wanted to remind Edith that she had been the one to dump Sean, but there was no point.

Gold interrupted the strained silence that followed.

“Belle, this is as good as any restaurant in Florence. Marco will be proud.” He smiled broadly, catching her eye over the rim of his wine glass. The sharp, slightly sweet wine was sublime with the rich creamy potatoes, and Belle flushed with pleasure. Her feeble stab at cooking was the starring dish of the party.

Clearly uncomfortable with all the praise directed at Belle’s dish, Edith fidgeted, interrupting the pleasant banter.

“Travel much, do you Mr. Gold?” Edith asked, her nose wrinkled like she smelled rotten eggs. “I don’t know how or why you would do that, with everything wrong with the world today…” Edith leaned back in her chair, her arms crossed. “It’s like people who use cilantro. None of it makes sense.”

“Well, I did for a time. I was an international affairs reporter for The Globe,” he offered.

“He was more than that,” Belle interrupted, the schnapps and wine making her brave. “He won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the first Gulf War.”

“Oh, yeah?” Moe nodded his approval. For the first time she could remember, Belle’s father put down his fork to pay attention to what she and her guest had to say. “Were you embedded, Gold?”

Gold relaxed as the conversation turned away from the food and into familiar territory. He flexed his fingers. “I was. I was with the Army’s Third Infantry division. Tanks.”

Moe swiveled toward Gold and Belle, presenting Edith with his meaty shoulder. “See any combat?” Moe took his first sip of wine. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Thank you, and yes, I did see some,” Gold answered, not wanting to get into details, but appreciative of Belle’s father’s interest in his work. He felt a bit like a teenager impressing his date’s father before the prom, and he was amazed to discover it wasn’t at all an unpleasant sensation.

“Fiddlesticks!” Edith huffed, rising from her chair and gathering her plate. “Boys and toys.” She shook her finger in Gold’s direction. “That was a conflict – not a war. They’ll give an award to anyone these days.”

Belle felt the color drain from her face, her momentary happiness giving way to despair. If the conversation wasn’t about Edith, or food, or Edith’s food, it was unwelcome.

Gold bristled. “Actually, Mrs. French, many men lost their lives. Children died. Villages burned. It was a war, and it’s rather insulting to hear opinions otherwise. And perhaps they do give out many awards these days.” He clenched the head of his cane until his knuckles cracked. “Makes it all the more interesting when a person doesn’t have one, yes?”

Edith’s back straightened, a steel rod through her spine, and she leveled her head and looked down her nose at her guest. Belle felt tears spring to her eyes, and she swallowed hard, fighting to retain her composure.

Gold smiled at Belle, a quick nod to let her know he was okay, that Edith wasn’t getting to him. But her eyes were dim and unseeing. She was frozen, her expressive face drawn and shuttered, as though Edith had sucked every ounce of hope and happiness from her soul.

The confidence and grace he’d observed upstairs drained out of her, and as he watched it happen, he became angrier with every passing second.

Anxious for something to do, Belle reached into the bread basket to pull out a roll with trembling fingers.

“Belle.” Edith eyed the roll in her hand and shook her head again.

Belle didn’t think. She opened her fingers and hurled the dinner roll at Edith’s smug face. It bounced off her forehead and landed in the pitcher of water with a plop, bloating and sinking to the bottom of the glass. Bloated and sinking. That was her.

Her stunned gaze collided with her stepmother.

“Excuse me,” Belle said, in as dignified a tone as she could muster. Mortified, she rose from the table and left the room on leaden feet.

“Belle!” Edith’s shrill tones pierced the silent, stuffy air. “Come back here!”

Gold dropped his napkin and pushed back from the table, his cane scraping the hardwood in a discordant squeak. His mind was spinning in vicious circles. All he wanted to do was go after Belle, to drag her out of this mental institution and never let her cross the threshold again.

He would take her out for a real dinner with real food, where they could relax and laugh and enjoy themselves. And drink a bloody glass of wine without censure. Then he would install her at Emma and Neal’s house or beg her to move in with him, marry him. Whatever it took to get her the hell away from here.

“Mr. Gold.” Edith’s frown was severe. “Keep your seat. Let me explain. Please.”

He could tell how much the appeal was costing her.

“Fine.” He conceded for the moment, lapsing into the frosty tone reserved for the lowlifes he didn’t want to interview but had no choice. He snapped open his pocket watch, then looked pointedly at Edith. “This better be good.”

Belle stood in the hallway outside the dining room, straining to hear their conversation.

A dull headache throbbed in the center of her forehead, the pain sharpening with every passing moment. Maybe the peach schnapps and the wine hadn’t been her best idea. She’d thrown Gold down on her bed and seduced him in her parents’ house, then she’d embarrassed him by having a tantrum at the table.

She’d told Erskine she loved him, and now he held her heart. Would he leave now, after enduring a main course of flagrant insults served with a side of backhanded compliments? She wouldn’t blame him for walking out the door and never looking back. She felt her heart crack inside her chest, the inevitability of disaster looming before her. She clenched her fists, her blunt nails digging into the flesh of her palms.

“Allow me to apologize for Belle.” Edith’s restrained voice filtered through the wall, and Belle wanted to punch the drywall. “She’s…families tend to have these little arguments now and again. She’s a passionate, spirited girl. I’m sure you understand. It’s nothing to be concerned about.”

From the other side of the wall, she rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at Edith.

“When it comes to Belle, I am in every possible way concerned,” Gold replied, the fury in his voice mounting. “I don’t know what sort of witchcraft you’ve employed to keep that glorious creature here under your roof. She’s desperate for affection and attention, and I’ve just spent an interminable hour listening to you cut her—and me—down in every possible way. I’m sick to my stomach, and it’s not from the overcooked pork or limp salad.”

“Mr. Gold—”

Belle peeked into the dining room in time to see Gold shift toward her father, his tone softening in appeal. “My God, do you even see her? She is brilliant and beautiful, full of life and light. All she wants to do is please you, to be enough." His voice grew deeper, rougher. "I don’t know why she even bothers, but she’s too incredible a person not to try.”

Dumbstruck, Belle ducked back into the hallway and leaned against the cool wall, wishing she could see the look on Edith and Daddy’s faces.

Gold continued, low and lethal, and Belle rose on tiptoe as if to better hear his next words. “If you want to offer apologies, Mrs. French, offer them on behalf of yourself and offer them to your daughter. We’re done here.”

Belle heard the scrape of a chair, then her eyes widened as Gold stumbled around the corner into the hallway, his face white and his lips twitching, eyes desperate and tear-filled. Wordlessly, she held out her arms to him and he collapsed against her, taking great, shuddering gulps of air.

“Shhh, deep breaths.” She held his trembling body as he struggled for oxygen, absorbing his shaking with her own tremors. She rubbed her hands in soothing circles across his back, then smoothed her fingers up and down his arms in gentle strokes. Her voice quavered as she spoke, grounding him, bringing him back to her. “Long breaths from deep down…I’ve got you, baby.”

“I’m sorry,” she heard him whisper between broken gasps. He raised his head from her shoulder, and she swiped tears from his pale, cool cheeks. “Belle, I’m so sorry.”

Hot tears dripped down her own face unchecked, the salt stinging her mouth. She hadn’t known she was crying, but after all the beautiful words he’d said about her, the way he defended her to Edith, how could she help it? “You have nothing to be sorry about, Erskine. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Oh, Belle. My beautiful, brave sweetheart.” He framed her face with his hands and kissed her, murmuring endearments against her lips. “How can you be so strong and courageous in the middle of all this madness?”

“Don’t you see?” She smiled at him through her tears. “It’s because I have you.”

###

 Notes: Thanks @sarashouldbestudying for this potato pie. Belle’s dress is here.

[therealreverendchris]

It’s June in America and we are a country in deep, deep trouble.The national debt is approaching $26 trillion dollarsAt the start of this week, the toll from COVID-19 stood at over 104,000 dead. And rising.As many as 40 million have lost their jobs over the last 11 weeks.Protests and violence fill the streets from Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Washington DC to our home in Asheville, NC. We cannot sustain this. We must change.I’m running for Congress in North Carolina’s 11 th District because we need new leaders in Washington. We need people with character and a record of standing up to do what’s right, no matter what the political party bosses say or how it will impact our careers. We need people with knowledge and experience and proven leadership ability.That’s my record. I served 25 years in the Air Force, retiring as Colonel. I was later a national security special for Congress, law professor and judge with the U.S. Department of Labor. I am perhaps best known as the Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who stood up to the Bush Administration and resigned my post when ordered to use evidence obtained by torture. Years later, I stood up to the Obama Administration in a legal battle for the free speech rights of government employees.Access to affordable healthcare for all, climate change, jobs and education are critical issues that I will focus on when I am in Washington. But first, we must heal the divide. We need leaders in Washington who will work to bring this nation together, not take advantage like those who would tear us apart.Help me get there.Proof: https://ift.tt/2z2oQL9 will be answering questions from 3-5 pm EST, June 4. Looking forward to it, AMA! via /r/politics

[thisdaynews]

Are Your Neighbors Ready for Mayor Pete?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/are-your-neighbors-ready-for-mayor-pete/

Are Your Neighbors Ready for Mayor Pete?

Illustration by Carne Griffiths

Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer forPOLITICO.

DECORAH, Iowa—On a cold night in a small town, a man had a question for Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate with a serious shot at the American presidency. How, he wanted to know, would he deal with leaders of foreign countries where it’s still illegal to be gay? Buttigieg, dressed as he almost always is, in brown shoes and blue slacks and a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, stood in the center of a stage surrounded by more than a thousand people who had packed into the gymnasium of the high school. Buttigieg gripped the hand-held mic and took a few steps forward.

“Sooooo,” he said, drawing out the syllable and the suspense, “they’re going to have to get used to it.”

Those 10 words, tough, almost defiant, elicited a response unlike anything else I witnessed trailing the ascendant Buttigieg on a pair of boisterous recent campaign swings. The sound started with a release of anxious laughter, followed by a hitch of surprise, before giving way to clapping and whistling and shouts and cheers that only got louder as what he had said sank in. It took nearly 30 seconds for the noise to subside.

Unspoken in his answer—maybe unintended but nevertheless true—was that he wasn’t only talking about, or even to, bigoted heads of state in distant, backward lands. He just as easily could have been speaking about his fellow Americans. For months now, Buttigieg’s utterly unprecedented campaign has offered a practically explicit challenge to voters: Can they accept the totality of who he is—the pragmatic, two-term mayor of a midsize midwestern city, the earnest nerd with a facility for language and degrees from Harvard and Oxford, the Navy Reserve lieutenant who did a seven-month stint in Afghanistan … and also the 37-year-old husband of a man who teaches Montessori middle school and with whom he hopes to parent children?

Up till now, Buttigieg’s youth and sexual orientation largely have been calling cards in the Democratic primary, distinguishing him in a field whose front-runners are in their 70s and whose back-of-the-packers are too numerous for most people to keep track of. Given his comparatively low profile not long ago, Buttigieg has raised astonishing amounts of money, from donors of all kinds but from wealthy gay supporters, too, eager to back a figure who could, they believe, crack or outright shatter the glass closet. As his poll numbers have climbed, particularly in the crucial early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, he has joined the foremost quartet of 2020 Democrats. And with that rise has come a new, more pointed question, raised by voters and political consultants alike, and rooted in electoral history: Will the one thing that makes Buttigieg totally new in the annals of presidential politics also prevent him from becoming his party’s nominee?

He’s not the first candidate to have faced this question, and not even the first in the last few cycles. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy raised the question, still unanswered, of whether the country was ready for a woman as commander-in-chief. In 2008, with Barack Obama, the question was about a black president. With Obama, the answer was a resoundingyes, but even in the primary it wasn’t always clear how things would turn out. Democratic voters, even the ones whoweremore than ready for Obama, were forced to wonder about the number of voters whoweren’t. At roughly this point in the ’08 race, Clinton led Obama by a lot, in no small part because voters, many of them black voters, simply thought he couldn’t win. Once he began winning primaries, those numbers shifted, and fast.

When it comes to the prospect of a gay president, the numbers right now are sobering for Buttigieg: Polling suggests that the country was more ready for a black president back in 2008 than it is for a gay president now. And last month, the current iteration of the question of readiness became front-page news when a leaked memo revealed focus groups commissioned by the Buttigieg campaign suggested his sexuality could be “a barrier” for black voters in at least South Carolina, the crucial fourth nominating contest—and a bellwether for the party’s more socially conservative voters.

As I followed Buttigieg in South Carolina and rode along on his latest Iowa bus tour, I met many citizens who feel legitimately drawn to him as an alternative to the other, older top-tier trio— Joe Biden, whom they view as aging and uneven, and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whom they consider pie-in-the-sky lefties trying to sell them unrealistic ideas that smack of government excess. I listened to these voters grapple with their reservations, as they weighed, out loud, their feelings of fledgling support against what they perceive as the stubborn intolerance of others, including their neighbors and in some cases members of their own families.

I heard it down south in South Carolina.

“People don’t change from their old beliefs,” Andrew Davis, 70, told me in Rock Hill.

And I heard it up north in rural Iowa.

“My mom is a devout Christian,” Michael Moe, 59, told me in Algona, “and she would never vote for a gay.”

“I feel bad, because it doesn’t bother me,” Larry Untiet, 71, told me in Spencer, “but I’m sure there’s people—about Pete’s sexuality—that it’ll affect their vote.”

“That was one of the thoughts that I had when thinking about him,” Danielle Borglum, 43, told me in Waverly. “Like, are we really ready for a gay president? Like, were we ready for a woman? I thought we were, butclearlywe weren’t, you know? So there’s always that hesitation: Are we going to get behind somebody and then all the hate is going to come out?”

And it’s not just voters who have identified Buttigieg’s sexuality as a potential obstacle. “I think it’s an issue,” Tim Miller, a gay Republican consultant who was Jeb Bush’s communications director in ’16, told me. He cited a recent Fox News poll he tweeted about in which 68 percent of Democratic primary voters said they think Biden can beat Trump, 57 percent said they think Warren can, 54 percent said they think Sanders can—and only 30 percent said the same about Buttigieg. “There’s only one reason for that,” Miller said. “And that’s the fact that he’s gay.”

To assuage these concerns, that his candidacy is too risky to fully embrace, Buttigieg lately has leaned into comparisons with Obama, at the top of the list of historic firsts—and the one who won. He calls himself “a young man with a funny name.” His cadence can conjure that of the 44th president. The architects of the campaign that made Obama the first black president certainly have noticed the parallels. “He used to say, ‘I am proudly of the black community, but I’m not limited to it,’” Obama strategist David Axelrod told me. “And from what I see from a distance, it feels like that’s the same approach Buttigieg is taking.”

When I asked Buttigieg on his bus about the pages he was taking from Obama’s playbook, he didn’t push back. One lesson: “You should give Americans credit for being able to do something different, for being able to move past old prejudices, and when people are moved and inspired, that happens in ways that cut across tribal, ideological party lines,” he said. “I think in a very simple way he just demonstrated what’s possible.”

But Obama in a quite literal way didn’t have to be the sort of trailblazer Buttigieg is having to be. Before Obama, there was Alan Keyes, there was Al Sharpton, there was Carol Moseley Braun. There was Jesse Jackson. They were different kinds of campaigns, but Americans had seen high-profile black candidates before. Buttigieg, on the other hand, has had to invent an entirely new template, and that’s meant running notasa gay candidateper se, but not running away from it, either. Sometimes he speaks about the humdrum doings of his domestic life. Sometimes he is conspicuously, politically prudent, speaking nearly in code about the manner in which his identity shapes who he is and how he’s running. And sometimes, like when I saw him in Des Moines, in a high-profile speech in the big downtown arena, he tells some 13,000 people that he’s planning on hunting deer in rural Michigan on the morning of Thanksgiving with his husband’s father—surely the first time a presidential candidate ever has strung together quite that collection of words.

“Look,” Buttigieg said in the second half of his answer in Decorah, talking to retrograde rulers, but also to everybody, everywhere, “one great thing about America is that when we’re at our best, we have challenged places around the world to acknowledge freedom and include more people in more ways.”

As people filed out, buzzing, into the dark and frigid air, I caught up with the man who had asked the question. David Mintz lives in Florida. He had come because his daughter moved here to work as an organizer for Buttigieg. He struck me, though, as clear-eyed about the hurdle at hand.

“The sexuality of this president is going to be an issue internationally … if not domestically,” Mintz said, envisioning a Buttigieg administration. And that’s if he somehow can … win. “He’ll never get to the presidency,” Mintz added, “if enough people here can’t come to terms with that.”

Back on Buttigieg’s blue and yellow bus, the more west we went, generally the more conservative the territory got, and I asked him if he had surprised himself with his answer by being so blunt.

“I mean, it’s just the truth,” he said, “right?”

The America in which Buttigieg is runningfor president is notably different from the America in which he grew up.

The decade before Buttigieg was born, gay elected officials were such a novelty that people can still recite their individual names. In 1974, out lesbians Kathy Kozachenko and Elaine Noble won seats on the city council of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, respectively. In 1977, openly gay Harvey Milk in 1977 was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Kozachenko served one term. Noble served two, a tenure marred by homophobic threats and bullet-riddled windows. Milk was assassinated.

In November of 1980, 14 months before Buttigieg was born, Barney Frank of Massachusetts was elected to Congress without revealing he was gay. Not until he had won an additional three elections did he come out. “I wouldn’t have been elected,” he would say later, about the beginning of his career, “if I was out.”

In the 1990s, even as Frank kept winning and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin made history as the first person to earn a seat in Congress after running as an openly gay candidate,President Bill Clinton signed laws making it illegal for openly gay Americans to serve in the military (“ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) or get married ( the Defense of Marriage Act). Capturing the era’s conflicted attitudes about homosexuality was the iconic 1993 episode ofSeinfeldin which Jerry and George try desperately to convince a reporter they’re not gay, with Jerry adding, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

It was then, in the halls of St. Joseph High of South Bend, Buttigieg began to feel the first “ indications” that he was gay. He was the valedictorian. He was the president of his class. He was voted by his peers as “ most likely” to be the president of the United States. He knew of no gay students.

The 2000s were turbulent with respect to gay rights, trending toward tolerance. But in 2004, when Massachusetts became the first state to let same-sex couples wed but 11 other states passed constitutional amendments prohibiting the same, Buttigieg graduated from Harvard— closeted. That year, there were three openly gay members of Congress and no senators; the governor of New Jersey came out and resigned in the same speech. Obama, who had favored gay marriage as a state senate candidate in 1996, modulated as a presidential candidate in 2008, recognizing the reality of the cultural and political currents of the time, advocating only for civil unions.

If there had been a pill when he was younger, Buttigieg has said, that would have made him not gay, he would have swallowed it without so much as a sip of water. If somebody could have pointed to the part of his insides that made him gay, he “would have cut it out with a knife.” Buttigieg was the president of the university’s Institute of Politics, a history and literature major, a Rhodes Scholar, and he believed he could be an aspiring politician, or he could be an out gay man. But the one thing he could not be, he was convinced, was both.

Fifteen years later and a thousand miles away,Buttigieg arrived one Saturday last month in Columbia, South Carolina, at a tailgate before a football game featuring historically black Allen University. The stop was an obvious piece of his ongoing efforts to make any semblance of inroads with the state’s African American voters, who made up a crucial 60 percent of the electorate in the 2016 primary. They have been cool to his candidacy: Buttigieg polls consistently in the single digits overall, but this fall his lack of support among black voters has put him at or near zero.

Since the report about the memo in which some in the focus group said they “felt the mayor was ‘flaunting’ his sexuality by the very mention of having a husband,” many in the black community, and in the Buttigieg campaign, too, have pushed back at the suggestion that Buttigieg’s sexuality is one of the reasons for his lagging support. Still, Rep. Jim Clyburn, 79, the House majority whip and longtime congressman from South Carolina, whose grandson works for Buttigieg, said recently, “That’s a generational issue. I know of a lot of people my age who feel that way. … I’m not going to sit here and tell you otherwise. I think everybody knows that’s an issue.”

One of the standard pieces of paraphernalia Buttigieg’s campaign distributes at his offices and his events introduces him, in this interesting order, as “a husband, Afghanistan veteran, and the Mayor of his hometown,” but he often on the stump presents himself as a veteran, as a relative moderate, and as a fresh, not-from-Washington option as much as or more than he does as a gay married man. It’s especially plain in a place like this.

Spending time with him up close, though, is to be constantly reminded that who he is as a public figure—what he represents to which voters, and where—is not always his choice. The first person to get to him at the tailgate, for instance, was a 23-year-old fashion designer. Kashmir Imani shook his hand and promptly gave him a homemade hat. “PETE 2020,” it said, and the front was decorated with a wash of bright rainbow colors. Buttigieg smiled, thanked her, showed it briefly to assembled reporters, and then handed it to an aide.

He walked toward the DJ and the smoking grill, one table piled with catfish on paper plates and hot dogs and hamburgers with Wonder Bread buns, another covered with buttons and shirts announcing #HBCUsForPete. He barely had gotten under one of the blue tents when he was asked about the Equality Act by a young black gay man.

“The House has passed it, but this president will never sign it,” Buttigieg told Donny Williams, queuing up what sounded like an answer he might give on TV. “So, it’s one of many, many reasons we need a new president, because I’ll sign it right away. Part of it’s also who gets on the [Supreme] Court, right? Making sure that we’re appointing justices who understand that it’s discrimination that can’t stand …”

Buttigieg, though, seemed to sense this was not necessarily what the 18-year-old Williams wanted to hear. He paused.

“Has that been your experience?” Buttigieg asked, the worddiscriminationstill hanging in the air.

“Horrible things,” Williams answered.

Buttigieg pursed his lips and nodded.

“I wouldn’t want to wish that upon a new generation,” Williams said.

“Our generation can fix it,” Buttigieg said.

“Stay strong,” he told Williams. “I’m glad you’re out here.”

Buttigieg then gave a short, anodyne greeting to the gathering, about “building community” and doing it with “joy,” and was gone.

Up the road in Rock Hill, a line wrapped around a block, nearly 1,700 mostly white people waiting for the Buttigieg town hall scheduled for an outdoor courtyard. I saw buttons saying “PRIDE FOR PETE” and “BOOT EDGE EDGE” in rainbow letters and “AMERICA’S FIRST COUPLE” with pictures of Buttigieg and his husband, the former Chasten Glezman. I saw shirts saying: “CHASTEN FOR FIRST GENTLEMAN” and “NOT STRAIGHT BUT STRAIGHT FORWARD” and “MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN.” The president of the local Winthrop University College Democrats told the crowd, “I, as a gay millennial, am reminded as I see a fellow gay millennial make a run for the highest office in the land, just how awesome this nation can really be.”

In his speech, though, Buttigieg didn’t describe himself as a gay millennial. He first and foremost described himself as a mayor, and mayors, he said, can’t call potholes “fake news”—they just have to fill them. He talked about ending “systemic racism.” He talked about tearing down “walls of mistrust.” And he talked about “values,” like “faith and family,” “security and democracy,” and “freedom”—including, he said, freedom from “county clerks … telling you who you ought to marry.” But he did not talk about, at least not specifically, his sexuality—and in the subsequent question-and-answer, he wasn’t asked about it, either. He was asked about climate change, and improving public education, and repairing foreign relations, and the difference between Medicare For All and his plan of Medicare For All Who Want It, and he was asked, actually, if the country is ready not for a gay president but for such a young president.

The question itself brought a raucous round of cheers and chants.

“Well,” Buttigieg said, “I guess we got our answer right there.”

He leaned hard into the youth question, adding that “the world right now is seeing a rise of a new generation of leaders,” citing the presidents of France (Emmanuel Macron is 41) and El Salvador (Nayib Bukele, 38) and the prime minister of New Zealand (Jacinda Ardern, 39). “I will also point out,” he went on, “as a matter of strategy—not to get too political—but every single time in the last 50 years or so that Democrats have won the Oval Office—I mean every single time—it’s been a candidate who hadn’t been on the scene very long, who wasn’t perceived as a creature of Washington. … It’s how he we win!”

And the following morning, at the state conference of the black A.M.E. Zion Church, where the men wore bowties and the women wore pearls and one congregant fanned his face with a cardboard fan touting Biden, Buttigieg delivered to a different audience a similar pitch, stressing unity and nodding to his sexuality in only the most tangential ways.

“There’s talk of a wall going up on the border,” he told them. “I doubt that that will ever be built, but I have seen walls go up so high even between us and others that we love. … We must do something about that crisis of belonging. All of us in different ways have been led to question whether we belong, and I know what it is to look on the news and see your rights up for debate. All of us must extend a hand to one another because I also know what is to find acceptance where you least expect it.”

He drew murmurs of approval and ripples ofamen.

Would his sexuality be “a barrier” for people here?

“It wouldn’t be a barrier for me,” Carl Bankhead, 67, from Hickory Grove told me after the service.

But for his neighbors?

“We have had some discussion on that,” he granted, “and I have heard individuals say that it would be a barrier for them.”

When I asked Ronnie Massey, 58, a retired truck driver from York, about Buttigieg’s sexuality, he looked a bit puzzled.

“His sexuality?” he said.

I told him he’s gay.

“Really?” he said. “He didn’t come off as, like, being gay.”

He never had.But what happened throughout his first term as mayor made it possible for Buttigieg to do what he finally did toward the end.

Fred Karger, for starters, a Republican consultant, strategist and self-described “activist,” launched a run for the White House in the 2012 cycle, which was largely ignored but nonetheless made him the first openly gay major party presidential candidate in American history. With Mitt Romney, a Mormon, running, Karger’s campaign was predicated on rebuking the anti-gay stances of LDS Church.

The man who was the president already, meanwhile, announced his support for gay marriage in May of that year, a move that did nothing to dampen his public approval. Under Obama’s watch, the enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had ended in late 2010, and the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013. In his second inaugural address, Obama pointedly connected the civil rights fights of women and blacks to the civil rights fights of gays. “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall,” he said. By 2014, more than half the country supported gay marriage, and more than seven in 10 people considered it inevitable. “The Gay Rights President,” historian Timothy Stewart-Winter, the author ofQueer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, would call Obama.

In South Bend, where Buttigieg took office in 2011 at age 29, these years read in the archives of theSouth Bend Tribunelike a string of the last acts of a closeted man, changing in what he thought was possible due to what was changing around him. He consistently advocated for gay rights, frequently funneling his explanations through the language of sound, just policy. In 2012, he signed into law a city ordinance that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. “I ran on a platform of economic development, and part of how you show that you have a healthy economy is you show that workers are treated fairly,” he said. In 2013, ’14 and ‘15, he spoke out, too, against the efforts of Gov. Mike Pence to amend the Indiana state constitution to ban gay marriage and institute its controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act. “This is not a Republican thing or a Democrat thing; this is just about the right thing,” Buttigieg said. “It’s not too late for the state to follow South Bend’s lead,” he added, “and add protections for LGBT Hoosiers.”

On June 16, 2015, in an essay in theTribune, he came out.

Three years to the day later, he was married.

And this past April, in a speech to the Victory Fund, the political action committee that aims to boost the number of gay people in elected office, he said, “Next time a reporter asks me if America is ready for a gay president, I’m going to tell the truth. I’m going to give them the only answer that I can think of that’s honest, and it’s this: I trust my fellow Americans. But at the end of the day, there’s exactly one way to find out for sure.”

The next week, he officially announced his run, kissing his husband on stage.

His rise, say historians of the gay movement that I talked to for this piece, is at once the result of half a century of struggle and absolutely astonishing in how seemingly sudden it’s been. “Before the Obama administration,” said Lillian Faderman, the author ofThe Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, “his candidacy would have been unthinkable.”

Even afterit. Just last year,latelast year, Andrew Reynolds, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, published a new book,The Children of Harvey Milk: How LGBTQ Politicians Changed the World. What does it say about Buttigieg, the man now running first in the Iowa polls? Nothing. All this has happened so fast he’s not in the book. Not even once. (Reynolds, for the record, told me this week a paperback is due out in the spring. Rest assured, he said, in the new epilogue, Buttigieg will be mentioned.)

In Iowa, the bus rolled on,across the northern reaches of the corn-covered state, behind lumbering, lane-clogging, green-painted farm vehicles with tall, knobby tires, the trajectory of the trip pressing the central question of this campaign deeper and deeper into politically more and more difficult terrain.

In Waverly, population 10,126, in Bremer County, where Obama won twice but Trump won 53 percent of the vote in 2016, and where Buttigieg was introduced by a city councilman who called him more impressive than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, Buttigieg got a question asking for a moment when he did the right thing in spite of potential adverse consequence. He opted to answer it by talking about coming out. “If your voters decide to fire you because of who you are,” he said to the 568 people jampacked into the high school cafeteria, “then it is what it is.” (Kari Rindels, 41, from Waterloo, who asked the question, told me she wasn’t sure others in her “very conservative, very Christian” family even would consider voting for Buttigieg. “To them, I hear a lot, you know, and I even hate repeating it, that thepersonis not wrong,” she said. “Love the person, hate the sin, in their eyes.”)

In Charles City, population 7,373, in Floyd County, where Obama won twice but Trump won 54 percent of the vote, Buttigieg was asked how he would, “as a gay man,” run his campaign “when evangelicals will make an issue” of his sexuality? “What I’m finding,” he said to the 276 people stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder into the Elks Lodge, “is the real question on voters’ minds is how their lives are going to be different if I’m president versus the one we’ve got or one of the competitors. And I find that elections are not so much aboutmylife. I’m happy to tell my story—and I’m proud of who I am—it’s really aboutyours.” (Donna Ponto, 60, from Greene, told me she asked the question because she has a gay cousin and two gay brothers and one of them and his husband are asking this question. She called Buttigieg “intelligent” and “likeable” and “sweet” but expressed doubt that what he said would work on actual evangelicals. “I didn’t feel like it was a real true answer,” she said.)

And in Spencer, the last stop of the last day of the bus trip, in the biggest town in heavily agricultural Clay County, where John McCain won 52 percent of the vote in 2008, where Romney won 59 percent of the vote in 2012, and where Trump won 68 percent of the vote in 2016, where the congressional representative is right-wing, anti-gay Steve King, more than 500 people filled a basketball court at the YMCA to see the very first credible gaycandidate for president.

One of those more than 500 people was Anneliese DeBeaumont, 19. Her long, blond, pink-trimmed hair stood out. She had driven two hours from the University of South Dakota. “I wanted to see him speak,” she told me. “It helps gay kids everywhere.” She likes him because he’s more moderate, and because he’s from the Midwest, not just because he’s gay, but still: “I was like, ‘There’s no way he’s going to make it this far,’” she said. “And he just kept going, and I was, like, ‘Whooooaaaa.’”

Also on hand: Kali Johnson, 17, with her short, purple hair, clutching her rainbow sign saying “PETE.” She had driven an hour from George, in Iowa’s northwest corner, population barely more than a thousand, where she attends a small, conservative school, she told me. “Having a gay president could be really eye-opening,” she said. “He could do a lot of things to help.”

Buttigieg told this crowd a story he deploys a lot.

“One of the best moments in this whole campaign was when a student came up to me,” he said. “A high schooler let me know that our campaign had signaled to her that she had a place in her school and in her community. She said, ‘I can go to school, having looked at your campaign—I now believe that I can go to school, talk about what I believe in, not be ashamed, just because I have autism.’ And I remember hearing that story and thinking, ‘Ah, now we’re really getting somewhere.’ Because if this campaign let her know, in some way that I don’t even completely understand, let her know, spoke to her, and let her know that she fits—if we can do that in a campaign months and months before the first vote is even cast, imagine what the American presidency can do if it is intentionally used to build up the sense of belonging in this country. This is what the presidency isfor.”

The questions in the question-and-answer sessions, written down on pieces of paper by people who had entered the gym, were being pulled from the jar. The last one was from “Chris B.”

“What protections,” the designated question-reader read, “do you plan for the LGBTQ community, especially for those who are transgender?”

Buttigieg, as is his custom at town halls, asked “Chris B.” to “give a wave” if he or she wanted. Usually, the person who asked the question is only too happy to take credit with an awkward hello, and Buttigieg invariably responds with one of his own. Here, though, in Spencer, Iowa, “Chris B.” gave no wave. Buttigieg clipped the pregnant moment and filled the silence.

“Um,” he said, “so this is obviously an issue of personal importance to me having grown up, not knowing if I would ever fit in. Because I was different. I didn’t know if my own community would have a place for me. And some great things have happened. Some great steps forward have happened in this country. I don’t think I would have guessed at the beginning of this same decade that we’re living in that it would be possible for me to stand in front of you, a married man, running for president of the United States.”

The people clapped and cheered.

“But just because marriage equality is the law of the land doesn’t mean that we’ve gotten there,” he continued. “We need an Equality Act to ensure at the federal level that it is not lawful to discriminate againstanybodybecause of who they are or because of who they love.”

The people clapped and cheered.

“Transgender Americans in particular are facing a lot of obstacles,” he said. “But Iknowthat progress is possible. Because of the things that have become possible.”

The most famous gay politician in America, even today, remains Harvey Milk, the San Francisco supervisor whose rise to prominence coincided with the first public bloom of the gay rights movement. Milk and Buttigieg are different in many ways—as different, it’s tempting to say, as South Bend and San Francisco, Milk the voracious populist with his bullhorn and his soapbox, Buttigieg the buttoned-up, cerebral son of professors with his impeccable syntax. Everything Milk did, too, he did “with an eye on the gay movement”—he wouldn’t have run, or won, without support from that community, in his city—whereas Buttigieg at times has been a reluctant poster boy.

The more I watched Buttigieg on the campaign trail, though, the more two similarities become apparent. One is that he, like Milk, sees the moral necessity as well as obviously the political utility of trying to tie the plight of gays to that of anybody who’s ever felt shut out or left out or demeaned or deprived—what Milk called “the oppressed of all stripes.” And the other? Their use of the wordhope. Nearly half a century ago, Milk talked often about “the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias, and the Richmond, Minnesotas,” saying “the only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if it the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right.”

Seeing Buttigieg, it’s hard not to think of him as a movement candidate, at least in part. It’s hard, after all, not to think of Donny, and Kali, and Anneliese from South Dakota. But of course, for Buttigieg to matter as more than a symbolic figure, he has to win, and he can’t win with only their votes. He needs to persuade the Mintzes and the Borglums and the Untiets and enough of their neighbors—a group of voters who want the candidates’ policies to matter as much or more than anything else, and who want some assurance that a majority of their fellow Americans can view him that way, too.

It’s instructive, in that regard, to go back to 2008, and look again at the poll numbers—in particular the ones about whether the country was ready to elect a black president. Back in 2000, it had been in the high 30s. In January of ‘08, at the beginning of primary voting, one poll put the number 54 percent. But by that April, by the time Obama had won in Iowa and South Carolina and 13 states on Super Tuesday, another poll said the number of Americans ready to elect a black president was as high as 76 percent. One conclusion to draw from that: When public opinion shifts, it can shift quickly. And perhaps it takes only one person to shift it. Two and a half months before the first 2020 vote, 50 percent of the public said they were “definitely” or “probably” ready to elect a gay president, although they were slightly more skeptical about the country as a whole.

So here, now, in red, rural Iowa, Buttigieg closed this event the way he does so many of his events.

“I am propelled by a sense of hope, and I know hope went out of style for a bit in politics, but you can’t do this if you don’t have a sense of hope,” he said, making many think about Obama, making me think about Milk, but extending this template that’s never before been tested in American politics. “Running for office,” he said, “is an act of hope.”

Less than two weeks later the biggest poll in Iowa came out. It showed he’s in first place by 9 points.

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[silvertipmountaincenter]

Subsidized housing renters pay price in roaches, mold, leaks

In this Feb. 20, 2019 photo, Destiny Johnson shows the broken door to her oven that she uses string to hold together, in her apartment in Cedarhurst Homes, a federally subsidized, low-income apartment complex in Natchez, Miss. The complex failed a health and safety inspection in each of the past three years. Upset with conditions, Johnson moved out in late March. (Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press)

NATCHEZ, Miss. — In this city known for pre-Civil War mansions, a young mother shared a government-funded apartment with her three small children and a legion of cockroaches.

They lurked in the medicine cabinet, under the refrigerator, behind a picture on the wall. The mother nudged a bedroom dresser and more roaches skittered away as her 2-year-old son stomped on them.

It was home, sweet home for Destiny Johnson and her kids — until she got fed up and moved out last month.

Inspectors had cited the apartment complex with urgent health and safety violations for the past three years. Yet the federal government continued to pay Johnson’s rent at a property where a three-bedroom unit like hers can run $900 a month.

“I’m not asking for the best,” she told a reporter weeks before leaving, “but something better than this, especially for these kids.”

Health and safety inspection scores at taxpayer-funded apartments assigned to low-income tenants have been declining for years, typically with no serious consequences for landlords, an Associated Press analysis of federal housing data shows.

Johnson’s former apartment is one of nearly 160,000 at private properties with federal contracts that have failed at least one inspection since 1999. Nationwide data show the vast majority of failing inspections involved urgent violations. They can range from electrical hazards to rampant vermin to piles of garbage.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidizes rents for tenants assigned to both privately owned apartments and public housing run by state or local authorities. Many in these 2.1 million households are disabled, elderly or single parents. As the nation’s biggest affordable housing provider, the federal government will spend about $18 billion this year for these two programs.

Yet tenants curse heaters that don’t heat, emergency exits that don’t open, windows that don’t close. They complain of rats, rust, holes and mold.

In 2015 alone, families living in subsidized housing reported at least 155,000 more cases of childhood asthma than expected if the rate were the same as for renters in other households, according to AP’s analysis of a national tenant survey. Medical studies tie asthma to mold.

Federal authorities acknowledge the long slide in inspection scores, which started a decade ago in the privately owned housing. They say in recent years they have been protecting tenants by reinspecting sites with surprisingly high scores and closely monitoring repairs.

“These older properties,” Housing and Urban Development spokesman Brian Sullivan said, “the private owners may not have the means to do needed repairs.”

Conditions have deteriorated so badly in many subsidized buildings that by the government’s own estimate it would take tens of billions of dollars to rehabilitate them.

___

Destiny Johnson lived with her children ages 1, 2, and 5, at Cedarhurst Homes on a dead-end street in Natchez, where Mississippi River trading and wealth built on slave plantations have yielded to inveterate poverty among a largely black population.

The heater in Johnson’s apartment didn’t work, so she was using the oven to keep warm until a stovetop fire last year. Johnson, 21, said she tried to use her fire extinguisher, but that didn’t work either, so she rushed to borrow one from a neighbor.

The oven still hadn’t been replaced several months later. Its door was tied closed with a bright pink cord.

In late March, she said, management finally provided a letter that let her move to a nearby subsidized complex with a better inspection record.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” Johnson said.

A former neighbor who still lives at the 30-unit Cedarhurst Homes, Whitley Williams, wanted to show a reporter and photographer her leaking water heater. The door to its closet was damp and swollen. She tried to heave it open, but the bottom scraped the floor and broke apart.

Her three children prefer to stay elsewhere, with her father.

Federal records list the site owner as The Columbia Property Group, which has managed or owned at least 66 federally contracted properties in Georgia, Florida and its home state of Mississippi.

Company President Melanie Moe referred questions to Bryan King, an officer at Mississippi-based Triangle Development, LLC. In an emailed statement, King said his development company was acquiring Cedarhurst Homes and planned to pursue federal tax credits for a “large renovation.”

The property earned inspection scores of 46, 53, and 54 out of a possible 100 from 2016 through 2018, federal data show. Any score up to 60 is now considered failing. At least three other Columbia Property Group sites have failed inspections since 2011, federal records show.

Federally subsidized private apartments, where tenants typically pay about a third of their income, fare worst in the South. Louisiana had the nation’s highest inspection failure rate at 12%, with Mississippi second at 10%.

Housing experts say landlords in poor, rural communities with low rents can have trouble amassing cash for repairs, despite federal payments.

Nationally, inspection scores at privately owned complexes like Cedarhurst Homes reached a peak of 90 in 2007 during the George W. Bush administration. Scores averaged 86 during Barack Obama’s two terms and 81 under President Trump as of June. AP’s analysis of historical trends uses data released in January. Since then, HUD has been revising its databases and released one that isn’t directly comparable and drops pertinent inspections.

Federal housing officials partly attribute the recent drop in scores to their crackdown on substandard repairs and inflated inspection scores . Under Trump, 92% of inspections found a violation, up from 85% under Obama and 77% under Bush.

Federal housing officials also say their new approach has driven up some scores as managers understand they must take repairs seriously.

In a March report , however, the Government Accountability Office told Congress that HUD’s inspection processes are outdated and need a thorough overhaul to ensure stronger oversight of building conditions.

And tenants in some buildings still complain that management hides problems from inspectors, covering cracks with duct tape, mold with a quick coat of paint, or even old junk with temporary partitions.

Michael Kane, executive director of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants, acknowledged the department has gotten tougher on inspections but said the decline in scores reflects continued deterioration of living conditions.

“As the buildings age, they develop certain kinds of problems. They didn’t have water leaks and mold at the beginning, but they sure … did 40 years later,” he said.

Federal officials acknowledge they must think hard before taking enforcement action that might shutter a property. The federal government ended most of its efforts to build new affordable housing in the 1980s, and private-sector financing for new construction has long been scarce.

HUD’s main programs now rely on the existing, gradually aging housing stock. “We lose the affordable housing forever. You never get it back,” HUD spokesman Sullivan said.

Since the start of 2016, he said, the agency has terminated 36 housing contracts. There are now about 24,000.

Most failing sites get what amounts to a warning and multiple chances to correct violations.

“Yet what’s going to save these programs is aggressive enforcement,” says Linda Couch, a housing policy official at the elderly advocacy group LeadingAge.

___

Job cuts over decades have hobbled HUD’s enforcement efforts from within.

“You could walk around all the offices and see all the empty desks where people used to work,” said Merryl Gibbs, a lawyer who enforced anti-discrimination housing law before retiring from the department in 2016.

The Trump administration proposed deep cuts in department funding as recently as March, but Congress has resisted.

Spending for HUD’s main housing programs is expected to increase about 2% to nearly $40 billion this year, by AP’s calculation. The total includes a third program that gives vouchers to another 2.2 million households, letting tenants pick a unit on the private market.

Many housing advocates want more vouchers and incentives for private landlords to accept them. Others suggest increasing tax credits for construction and repairs, more federal staff and resources for better oversight, and more tenant participation in site improvements.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson has acknowledged a drastic shortage of low-cost housing and stressed the federal role. A physician by training, Carson has also pointed to the connection between residential mold and asthma.

That tie is supported in federal data. The share of U.S. households reporting mold was higher in subsidized rentals than other rentals, according to the latest data available from the American Housing Survey. Meanwhile, 13% of subsidized rental households reported at least one child with asthma, compared with 7% for other rentals. The differences hold even accounting for family size and poverty.

Housing advocates say funding remains the bottom line.

“We try and come up with solutions that don’t cost anything,” said Priya Jayachandran, a former senior administrator at HUD and now president of the National Housing Trust. “The answer is money.”

___

On a recent visit to Baltimore’s Rosemont Tower for elderly or disabled tenants, stairwells were littered with plastic caps for needles used to inject heroin.

Tenants in this federally funded public housing complained of bedbugs and mice. Signs saying “mandatory fire watch” alerted residents that the sprinkler system was broken, requiring a firefighter to stand watch around the clock.

A recurrent leak has sopped a prized Oriental rug and spread mold into the living room of Della Thomas.

“Every time there’s a real heavy rain, the ceiling gets a big bubble, and it starts to leak. They just kind of patch it up until the next time,” said Thomas, 64. She pointed to a plastic trash can, saying management provided it to catch drips.

Ingrid Antonio, a spokeswoman for the Housing Authority of Baltimore City, said security guards make regular rounds and pest extermination happens at least every three months. She said stairwells are cleaned daily.

To increase funds for repairs, however, the building will be converted to private ownership in coming months but remain subsidized housing, she said.

Inspectors gave the 200-unit high-rise a failing score of 25 in 2017. That jumped to 71 last year, according to the housing authority, though urgent violations and smoke detector problems persisted. A reinspection was planned for later this year.

Of 37 Baltimore public housing sites, 22 failed their last inspection, according to data from HUD and the housing authority.

“Steadily declining federal investment in public housing for more than a decade has taken a tremendous toll,” the city’s housing authority said in a statement.

Largely due to Baltimore’s blighted complexes, since 2013 Maryland had the country’s highest inspection failure rate for public housing at 32%. The District of Columbia was second at 29%. The national average was 10%.

Around the country, inspection scores at public housing have fallen under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Scores averaged 89 during Obama’s second term, dropping to 79 under Trump through March 2018.

HUD’s most recent estimate, from 2010, concluded that public housing needed about $25.6 billion in large-scale repairs and at least $3.4 billion more each year. That would have added up to well over $50 billion by now. Instead, Congress has restricted repair spending to $23.5 billion.

The federal government also has tried to avoid expensive takeovers.

HUD knew for years of broken appliances, pests, racial discrimination and other “deplorable conditions” at buildings run by the Alexander County Housing Authority in southern Illinois, according to the agency’s inspector general. It wasn’t until 2016 that department officials finally took control.

By then, they needed to close four complexes and relocate hundreds of residents.

___

Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. David McFadden in Baltimore contributed.

___

Reach Jeff Donn on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jadonn7

Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Reporting the facts for over 140 years.

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[108mileranchwildlife]

Conversation with a CO

I met with Conservation Officer (CO), Joel Kline, this past week in his office. Joel is one of two COs in the “Fraser River Zone”. COs are responsible for enforcing Provincial fishing, hunting, off road vehicle, environmental management, and  open burning regulations as well as responding to wildlife conflict reports. He arrived in 100 Mile in mid-May, but has been a CO for approximately nine years in placements across our Province. Prior to that he worked within the Parks system for nine years. He also has a degree in Conservation Enforcement . He chose this field because he never wanted to get stuck behind a desk and is most at home out-of-doors. Kline converses easily and is very open and hopeful that we can build a BearSafe community. I was blown away by how open and helpful he was. I wish everyone could meet him and see how very much he truly cares about the people and the animals he is sworn to protect.

This has been a busy fall for our two COs.  In some areas spring also brings a lot of bear activity, but in the 100 Mile/108 Mile Ranch area the vast majority of bear activity seems to be concentrated in the fall. Approximately  three years ago there was also a large bear presence and COs from other regions were brought in to help. This fall has been extremely busy as well. Kline said that there are many theories about why we have  such a large bear population this year and while the fires have caused migration and disruption for many animals, including bears, the interesting thing is that our region has had two years of bumper berry crops. Berries are one of the main components in a healthy bear diet. He shared that they have seen really healthy cubs and excellent cub survival rates in the past two years. That may be why we seem to have so many more bears roaming around this year. There really hasn’t been research in our area, but this conclusion is based on what the COs have witnessed. Provincially we have a very large black bear population. Usually estimated at 120,000, it is believed we currently have a black bear population exceeding 160,000.

While black bears are intelligent, they tend to be lazy, especially in the fall when they are seeking food to fatten them up for their winter hibernation. Our region has been challenged this year because the bears are finding extremely easy access to garbage. When garbage is left out in a carport, on the driveway, near the road, bears find them and don’t hesitate to dig in. Essentially, it is fast food for bears. It also increases the probability of human-bear conflict. According to statistics from WildSafeBC approximately 60% of bear deaths could be prevented if people secured their garbage.

Provincial policy states that if a bear has been frequently feeding on non-natural food sources in residential areas (food conditioned and human habituated) and poses a threat to human safety, it is not a candidate for relocation and may have to be put down. This is a tough consequence for the general public to accept. We tend to focus on the action COs are forced to take when confronted with a garbage habituated bear. Yet, the reality is that black bears were here before us. Every fall is going to bring a parade of bears through our communities and if we continue to have garbage easily accessible and not in bear resistant trash cans or locked up in sheds, shops or garages, we are going to continue to see bears getting exposed to the garbage and, ultimately, killed. Folks question why bears are not relocated, why are they shot, when the focus needs to be on how we humans are exposing these beautiful bruins to attractants and how to end that exposure. Locking up garbage saves bear lives.

Prior to speaking with Kline, I requested that community members on the 108 Mile Ranch Wildlife Safety Facebook page send me some questions they would like me to ask him. He spoke openly and honestly and patiently answered every question I asked. I would like to thank Mr. Kline for his time, patience and dedication. I hope we can all work together to save bear lives.

Questions follow this image.

Questions:

1. Are COs watching Facebook posts to find out where bears are so they can go out and shoot them?

Kline looked at me for a moment as if puzzled. It seemed to surprise him that people thought this. “No,” he said, “I don’t even have Facebook and I definitely don’t have time to spend  visiting all of the different pages where people are talking about bears. We respond to bear calls that have been routed through the RAPP number, 1-877-952-RAPP (7277).” I must note here that, as I sat talking with Kline, his call screen rapidly filled up. I couldn’t read the screen, but he said they were all calls regarding bears. It appeared that, in the hour I spoke with him, approximately 5 calls came in.

Kline stressed that it is extremely important, that if people do have a concern about wildlife, that they call it in, rather than simply posting it on Facebook. If it is only on Facebook, they will not see it. If by chance, someone forwards the image of a post, they generally can’t respond. It is vital that witnesses to wildlife events call the RAPP line or RCMP . If witnesses do not come forward, they cannot respond.

2. Where do they do with the hide and meat of killed animals.

Kline says that generally speaking, the animals are returned to nature. They find a location in the bush, far from human habitation, roads and trails and leave the carcasses to feed scavengers and return to the soil. They avoid taking them to local dumps because people were sneaking in, removing hides, skulls, paws and claws.

They are not usually able to donate the meat of a diseased or garbage habituated bear. If you think of what might be in our garbage, you will understand why. A bear could have eaten poison, discarded medication, or something else that would taint the meat. For other animals not habituated to garbage or obviously ill, such as deer, it is possible for that meat to be donated. However, they have to take it to a butcher who examines the carcass and, as he processes the meat, determines whether or not it is safe for human consumption. In the end, the Ministry of Environment (MOE) and the COs must ensure the meat is safe for human consumption before they can donate it. It is important to note that trichinosis, a disease caused by roundworms, is common in many predators, such as bears, and can be transferred to humans through meat consumption if not properly cooked.

Occasionally, though rarely, a hide is preserved and kept by the MOE for use in educational presentations. Sometimes First Nations communities will request a hide for traditional use. Once in a while museums will request a hide and/or skeleton. For the most part, however, the full animal is returned to nature.

3.  Are fines being issued? If no, why not? What are the fines?

Under the Wildlife Act, in BC, these are the most common fines:

A. If a person is caught intentionally feeding “dangerous” wildlife such as bears, wolves, coyotes and cougars: $345 or the charged can go to court;

B. Intentionally attracting dangerous wildlife, i.e. for photographs or just fun to watch: $345 or court; and/or

C. Attracting dangerous wildlife, whether or not a person intends to, i.e. unsecured garbage, unpicked fruit, etc.: $230 or court

Fines are issued. Kline prefers to attempt education first. Whether or not to issue a fine is at the discretion of the CO. If someone is repeatedly attracting wildlife, they are more likely to receive a fine. It is possible that, if we continue to have problems with people not containing their garbage, that a concentrated effort involving additional COs could be organized and community members fined during a sweep.

4. Would a neighbourhood watch type program be helpful?

It could be very helpful if the watch members are trained, good at communicating in difficult circumstances and are working with COs. Building a team to support and work with COs would be an extremely positive community action. The BearSafe Community Program is in place in several communities around BC and has been a great help.

5. What do you think will help reduce the human conflict with our native wildlife?

Secure your garbage is the number one thing everyone can do and it will make a big difference. Keep all food inside your home, barn, shed, garage or shop and keep the doors and windows secured. Pick fruit daily or remove the fruit bushes or trees. Only put out bird feeders in the winter. Do not feed or attract the natural prey animals to your homestead. Do not put cooked food or meat to compost piles and keep your compost well-turned and covered.

6. I saw a bear trap out - how do they know if they got the right bear?

Bear traps are placed in an area where a specific bear has been visiting. If a bear has been repeatedly approaching a house and snooping around in specific areas around that house, then that is where the trap will be placed. Yes the trap is baited because if it weren’t there is no way the bear would enter it. Property owners usually provide COs with a description of the bear in question. Black bears often have a distinct appearance, say a white spot on its chest, a grey muzzle or a brown face. COs will observe the bear in question when afforded the opportunity. They can also measure teeth and use other methods to identify a bear. It isn’t often that a specific property has more than one bear repeatedly approaching specific areas and the COs do everything they can to reduce or eliminate the possibility of capturing the wrong animal.

7. Where are the bears going to hibernate?

There hasn’t been any scientific study done in the area on this, so the COs can only guess based on their experience and the answer is - everywhere and anywhere they can find suitable shelter. Some may find a spot within a community, some just outside the community and others may wander for quite a while.

8.  What is the area covered by the COs stationed in 100 Mile House?

The two COs stationed here are considered to be in the Fraser River Zone. Roughly, this stretches from 100 Mile House to  Clinton to the Fraser River and Enterprise Road north of Lac La Hache; East to Mahood Lake and south, across HWY 24 and to Bonaparte Lake

9.  Why aren’t the black bears relocated?

Relocation of black bears has not generally been successful, especially not for garbage-conditioned or human-habituated bears. Over the years they found the bears were often killed by another bear who didn’t like them in their territory or they starve because they are not familiar with the area and locations of food sources such as berry patches or fish bearing streams. They also tend to seek out human homes and communities - seeking that easy food they have learned to find. No matter how far away they were relocated, they tended to work their way back to the area they know.

The good news is that orphaned first-year cubs, if not human habituated or garbage-conditioned may be candidates for an approved rehab facility.. For example, if a mother bear is killed in a motor vehicle accident, COs  have the ability to capture, assess the cubs health and history and potentially transfer them.

Whew, I honestly felt like I could sit there all day asking questions! I truly appreciate Mr. Kline’s time and earnest effort to help educate our community.

[bonusblanket]

1-200 :))

omg hate you ahahaha

200: My crush’s name is: a very nice name199: I was born in: 1997198: I am really: an idiot197: My cellphone company is: verizon y’all196: My eye color is: blue195: My shoe size is: 9194: My ring size is: 8? 7? idk193: My height is: 5 foot 7 inch yo192: I am allergic to: certain hand soaps191: My 1st car was: 2001 monte carlo190: My 1st job was: face painter ahaha189: Last book you read: You Deserve A Drink by Mamrie Hart188: My bed is: a giant marshmallow 187: My pet: the cutest lil rattie186: My best friend: hilariousness 185: My favorite shampoo is: whatever cleans my hair184: Xbox or ps3: I'm more of a nintendo ds gal myself183: Piggy banks are: actually kind of inefficient 182: In my pockets: you will find various items181: On my calendar: things to do 180: Marriage is: legal now179: Spongebob can: officiate my wedding178: My mom: is the best woman 177: The last three songs I bought were? oh gosh idk. Probably the 1975176: Last YouTube video watched: shane dawson singing175: How many cousins do you have? a billion174: Do you have any siblings? the best sister in the world173: Are your parents divorced? no172: Are you taller than your mom? yes171: Do you play an instrument? i play a bunch170: What did you do yesterday? bought a milkshake ;)

[ I Believe In ]169: Love at first sight: hells yeah168: Luck: eh..preparation meets opportunity 167: Fate: depends166: Yourself: most of the time165: Aliens: HELLS. YEAH164: Heaven: well I'm not sure 163: Hell: not sure but ik if i end up there at least i’ll be with my friends162: God: im not sure but if she exists i hope she’s looking out for my gay ass161: Horoscopes: they’ve been on point before160: Soul mates: maybe 159: Ghosts: yeesss158: Gay Marriage: of course157: War: why does it exist156: Orbs: never seen one but 155: Magic: ehhhh nah

[ This or That ]154: Hugs or Kisses: depends..both 153: Drunk or High: high off life man152: Phone or Online: I do both simultaniously  151: Red heads or Black haired: both are nice150: Blondes or Brunettes: both are nice149: Hot or cold: depends!!148: Summer or winter: ahhhgggg depends147: Autumn or Spring: autumn 146: Chocolate or vanilla: chocolate145: Night or Day: night144: Oranges or Apples: oranges143: Curly or Straight hair: in between142: McDonalds or Burger King: mickey d’s for sure141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate: milk chocolate140: Mac or PC: mac mac mac139: Flip flops or high heals: flip floppers138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor: oh god137: Coke or Pepsi: coke136: Hillary or Obama: obama135: Burried or cremated: either is fine i guess 134: Singing or Dancing: both 133: Coach or Chanel: walmart      aahahhahaha132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks: kelly clarkson131: Small town or Big city: both130: Wal-Mart or Target: depends what i’m trying to buy129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler: neither128: Manicure or Pedicure: manicure127: East Coast or West Coast: aw both 126: Your Birthday or Christmas: christmas125: Chocolate or Flowers: both124: Disney or Six Flags: disney123: Yankees or Red Sox: yanks

[ Here’s What I Think About ]122: War: why121: George Bush: whhhyyyyy120: Gay Marriage: can’t wait to get gay married119: The presidential election: traumatizing 118: Abortion: let the individual woman decide what’s best for her 117: MySpace: i wish i was born earlier so i could've been a part of it116: Reality TV: AMAZING115: Parents: can't live with em can't live without em amirite114: Back stabbers: why 113: Ebay: amazing112: Facebook: past its prime111: Work: find a job that doesn't suck110: My Neighbors: i don't talk to them really109: Gas Prices: skyrocketed i tell you!!108: Designer Clothes: love me some gucci107: College: i applaud people who do well at it106: Sports: sports!105: My family: love them to death104: The future: don’t even wanna think about it

[ Last time I ]103: Hugged someone: today102: Last time you ate: just now ;)101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile: the other day100: Cried in front of someone: yesterday lol99: Went to a movie theater: I saw beauty and the beast 98: Took a vacation: 2 years ago i think97: Swam in a pool: IT’S BEEN TOO LONG96: Changed a diaper: i don't think i ever really have95: Got my nails done: lol94: Went to a wedding: its been years93: Broke a bone: been yeARS92: Got a peircing: YEARS!91: Broke the law: neverrrrr90: Texted: like just now all the time constantly 

[ MISC ]89: Who makes you laugh the most: every single friend, my sister, my grandma88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is: craft sunday87: The last movie I saw: gosh idk86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most: seeing The 1975 ;)85: The thing im not looking forward to: adulthood84: People call me: B83: The most difficult thing to do is: isn't everything difficult 82: I have gotten a speeding ticket: nope81: My zodiac sign is: libra80: The first person i talked to today was: I'm not sure79: First time you had a crush: probably the first day of my life78: The one person who i can’t hide things from: i hide things from everyone because I'm secretly a spy77: Last time someone said something you were thinking: ALL THE TIME76: Right now I am talking to: me fwends75: What are you going to do when you grow up: probably die sometime74: I have/will get a job: both73: Tomorrow: is friday72: Today: is not friday71: Next Summer: gon be lit70: Next Weekend: ton be lit 69: I have these pets: 1 rat68: The worst sound in the world: PEOPLE CHEWING 67: The person that makes me cry the most is: no one makes me cry, I'm a spy66: People that make you happy: my family and my friends 65: Last time I cried: yesterday or something idk64: My friends are: amazing 63: My computer is: the shit62: My School: what is school61: My Car: has the best snack bin60: I lose all respect for people who: don't respect others59: The movie I cried at was: like every single movie58: Your hair color is: blonde57: TV shows you watch: supergirl, wynonna earp, nerd stuff56: Favorite web site: this stupid one55: Your dream vacation: london54: The worst pain I was ever in was: when my first lil rat buddy died53: How do you like your steak cooked: i don't eat steak currently52: My room is: calming51: My favorite celebrity is: demi lovato. she has my whole heart50: Where would you like to be: california, england, or ireland49: Do you want children: someday maybe48: Ever been in love: you betcha47: Who’s your best friend: got a bunch 46: More guy friends or girl friends: girl friends45: One thing that makes you feel great is: music44: One person that you wish you could see right now: my dad43: Do you have a 5 year plan: yeah kind of42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die: kind of41: Have you pre-named your children: not really but there are some names i like40: Last person I got mad at: i don't really get mad a lot 39: I would like to move to: socal, nyc, and london38: I wish I was a professional: writer

[ My Favorites ]37: Candy: twix36: Vehicle: 1984 jeep grand wagoneer35: President: obameerrr34: State visited: california33: Cellphone provider: verizon i guess..why is this a question32: Athlete: the fab five 31: Actor: fred armisen30: Actress: currently katie mcgrath 29: Singer: demi lovato 28: Band: the 197527: Clothing store: love me a good thrift shop26: Grocery store: weis i guess25: TV show: the office 24: Movie: labyrinth23: Website: this one22: Animal: rat i guess21: Theme park: disney world20: Holiday: halloween19: Sport to watch: water polo18: Sport to play: softball17: Magazine: british vogue 16: Book: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time15: Day of the week: friday or saturday14: Beach: cape may13: Concert attended: the 1975 and demi12: Thing to cook: cereal because its quick af11: Food: do cheetos count?10: Restaurant: moe’s, cyber cafe, red robin9: Radio station: the indie/alt station8: Yankee candle scent: probably a nice autumn scent or a nice mahogany 7: Perfume: ck2 or lacoste 6: Flower: rose and peony 5: Color: black, white, light pink, lavender 4: Talk show host: ellen, j fallon, james corden3: Comedian: tina fey2: Dog breed: whippet1: Did you answer all these truthfully? best i could 

[patriotsnet]

How Many Seats Did Republicans Gain In The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-seats-did-republicans-gain-in-the-house/

How Many Seats Did Republicans Gain In The House

What To Watch For

Following the Census count, all states are tasked with drawing new legislative district maps that reflect the population shifts. Most states leave that responsibility up to the legislatures, though more states are now handing the process off to an independent commission. Because of Republicans dominance in statewide elections, they control the redistricting process in more states than Democrats do. Republicans are in charge of line-drawing for 187 congressional seats, while Democrats control just 87, according to the Cook Political Report. Population growth in states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina, means the GOP is to increase its grip on power. Some House members who represent districts in states that lost seatssuch as West Virginiawill be forced to retire or try and win in a new district running against another incumbent in their state.

Democrats Flip 39 Seats In Latest Tally As Losing Gop Rep Mia Love Tears Into Republicans Over Treatment Of Minorities

Democrats made a net gain of 39 House seats in this year’s midterm elections, NBC News has concluded, after Democrat Ben McAdams defeated GOP Rep. Mia Love in Utah’s 4th Congressional District.

That race was NBC News’ lone remaining uncalled contest.

The gains that propelled Democrats to retake the majority in the House come on the back of the largest margin of victory, in terms of total votes, that either party has seen in a midterm election. Democrats held the prior record for vote margin, which came in 1974 with the backdrop of the Watergate scandal.

Though President Donald Trump’s first midterm election was not particularly kind to him, it is common for the party not in control of the White House to make significant gains in that initial midterm. On the House side, President Barack Obama saw Republicans make a 63-seat net gain in 2010, while President Bill Clinton watched as the GOP picked up 54 seats in 1994.

Its Not All Bad News For Democrats

While it was unquestionably a good night for Republicans, Democrats still held onto most of the seats they won in 2018 and will continue to be the majority party in the House. Thats in part because they retained most of the suburban districts they picked up in 2018.

Of the 233 seats that Democrats held coming into the election, 186 of them were in districts that were predominantly or partly suburban in nature, according to density categorizations by Bloombergs CityLab. Thus far, Democrats have lost seven of those seats, but they captured one GOP-held suburban seat around Atlanta. And thanks to redistricting, theyve also won two formerly Republican seats around Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina, which reflect the partys strength in more populous areas.

Because of their relative success in the suburbs, Democrats kept many seats in places President Trump won in 2016. Coming into the election, Democrats held 30 seats in districts Trump carried in 2016, and they wouldve lost their majority if theyd lost more than half of them . But theyve won 18 of them so far and picked up one from the GOP . In fact, more than half of Republicans gains have come in seats representing places that Trump won by a pretty sizable margin in 2016. Well have to wait a bit before data can tell us how congressional districts voted in 2020, but for now it seems many Republican gains were made by picking off the lowest-hanging fruit.

Trump Shames Republicans Who Lost Midterms Did Not ’embrace’ His Support

“The president’s behavior towards me made me wonder, what did he have to gain by saying such a thing about a fellow Republican?” Love said. “It was not really about asking him to do more, was it? Or was it something else? Well, Mr. President, we’ll have to chat about that. However, this gave me a clear vision of his world as it is no real relationships, just convenient transactions. That is an insufficient way to implement sincere service and policy.”

Love then tore into Republicans for their treatment of minority voters before vigorously defending conservative policies as more beneficial to all Americans.

“Because Republicans never take minority communities into their home and citizens into their home and into their hearts, they stay with Democrats and bureaucrats in Washington because they do take them home or at least make them feel like they have a home,” Love said. “I’ve seen the cost of conservatives for not truly taking people into their hearts.”

“Democrats saw newly elected black members and women into Congress this election,” she continued. “This is a matter of fact that Republicans lost in this regard. However, minority communities need to ask themselves this question also: At what cost? What is the cost of staying with the Democrat Party that perpetually delivers exactly what you need to stay exactly where you are?”

This story has been updated to reflect NBC’s retraction of its call for the Republican in California’s 21st congressional district.

Why Did The Republicans Perform So Well In The Us Congressional Elections

Three factors played a part: preconceptions, policyand polls.

One of the manyironies of Republican support forPresident Donald Trumps effortstochallenge the outcome of the 2020 election is that the Republican Party, save the president himself, actually did very well in it. Unless the Democrats manage to win both runoffs in the special election early in January, Republicans will keep the Senate. While Democrats held on to their majority in the House, the margin of that majority has shrunk, leaving the party to worryabout 2022 already.

This was unexpected:Joe Biden was polling ahead, yes, but so were Democrats in many congressional races. Yetrelative Republican success followed. The Republican Senator Susan Collins, who was expected to lose her Maine seat, not only won, but won quite comfortably. In Iowa, almost all polls besides the states own Des Moines Registershowed a tight presidential race. In fact, not only did Trump win the state, but the Republican Senator Joni Ernsther seat and the Democratic Representative Abby Finkenauer lost hers.

All of which raises the question: what went right for Republicansand wrong for Democrats?

There are three possible answers: preconceptions, policy and polls.

Theres a third possibility,which is that polls were wide off the mark about support for Trump, and for the Republicans more generally.

Watch Georgia North Carolina Florida And Arizona

Nathan L. Gonzales

ANALYSIS More than 16 months before Election Day, new House district lines havent even been drawn, and yet the fight for Congress is likely to hinge on the outcomes in four critical states.

On a basic level, every state matters in the Senate, considering Republicans need to gain just a single seat to get to the majority. Each significant recruitment development would instantly affect the handicapping of a race and the fight for control. But there are other states less dependent on a single candidate.

Every seat also matters in the House, where Republicans need a net gain of five seats for a majority a paltry number in a body of 435 members and in the face of the midterm history, which favors the party out of the White House. And some states, such as Texas, are of particular importance to one of the chambers. But a handful of states are hosting competitive races that will affect control of both the House and the Senate.

Incumbents Who Sought Other Offices

U.S. House members who ran for President

1 Democratic member of the U.S. House

Running for president, 2020

U.S. House members who sought a seat in the U.S. Senate

2 Democratic members of the U.S. House

3 Republican members of the U.S. House

Running for Senate, 2020

U.S. House members who ran for governor

1 Republican member of the U.S. House

Running for governor, 2020

U.S. House members who ran for another office

2 Republican members of the U.S. House

1 Democratic member of the U.S. House

Running for another office, 2020 Name No

An Incoming Class Of History

Several of the newly elected state representatives are making history.

The Republican Madison Cawthorn, 25, who beat the Democrat Moe Davis to represent North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, will become the youngest member of Congress in modern history.

The Democrat Cori Bush is set to become the first Black congresswoman from Missouri after winning in the state’s 1st Congressional District.

The Democrats Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres will also be the first openly gay Black men to serve in Congress, after winning in New York’s 17th and 15th districts respectively.

And nine out of the eleven Republicans who have so far unseated incumbent Democrats are women wins that will drastically expand the representation of women and especially of women of color in the House Republican caucus.

Currently, there are just 13 voting female Republican representatives in the House and 11 female Republican incumbents who ran for reelection in 2020.

Why Did House Democrats Underperform Compared To Joe Biden

The results of the 2020 elections pose several puzzles, one of which is the gap between Joe Bidens handsome victory in the presidential race and the Democrats disappointing performance in the House of Representatives. Biden enjoyed an edge of 7.1 million votes over President Trump, while the Democrats suffered a loss of 13 seats in the House, reducing their margin from 36 to just 10.

Turnout in the 2018 mid-term election reached its highest level in more than a century. Democrats were fervently opposed to the Trump administration and turned out in droves. Compared to its performance in 2016, the partys total House vote fell by only 2%. Without Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, Republican voters were much less enthusiastic, and the total House vote for Republican candidates fell by nearly 20% from 2016. Democratic candidates received almost 10 million more votes than Republican candidates, a margin of 8.6%, the highest ever for a party that was previously in the minority. It was, in short, a spectacular year for House Democrats.

To understand the difference this Democratic disadvantage can make, compare the 2020 presidential and House results in five critical swing states.

Table 1: Presidential versus House results

Arizona

How Republicans Pulled Off A Big Upset And Nearly Took Back The House

Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN

There seemed to be one safe bet when it came to the 2020 election results: Democrats would easily hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. Not only that, but the conventional wisdom held that Democrats would pick up more than the 235 seats they won in the 2018 midterm elections.

will have a majority has projectedJack Kersting FiveThirtyEight clockedThe Economist modelfinal polling averages at the Crystal Ballwhat polls suggestedCook Political ReportInside Electionsare leading

Incumbents Defeated In Primary Elections

The following table lists incumbents defeated in 2020 House primary elections or conventions.

Incumbents defeated in primaries

See also: Incumbents defeated in 2018 congressional elections

In the 2018 midterm elections, 378 U.S. House incumbents ran for re-election. This was the lowest number of U.S. House incumbents seeking re-election since 1992.

Thirty-four incumbents9 percentlost their re-election bids. That included two Democrats and 32 Republicans. This was the highest percentage of incumbents defeated since 2012, when 10.2 percent were not re-elected.

The following data for congressional re-election rates from 2000 to 2016 was reported in Vital Statistics, a joint research project of the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. Find the original datasets and methodology . Data for the 2018 election came from .

Defeated U.S. House incumbents by party, 2000-2018 Year

U.S. House incumbents retired, defeated, or reelected, 2000-2018 Year Percentage of those seeking reelection 2018 97.8

Popular Vote By Party And State

The following table displays the total number of votes received and the number of seats won by party for each state in the 2016 U.S. House elections. It also compares the percentage of the total vote received by each party to the percentage of seats in the state won by each party. Some interesting facts:

Republican candidates received 49.13% of total votes cast in 2016 and won 55.4% of U.S. House seats. Comparatively, Democratic candidates received 48.03% of votes and won 44.6% of races. Third-party and write-in candidates received 2.56% of votes.

Third-party candidates received the highest percentage of votes in Arkansas with 18.42% of votes cast. Comparatively, Democratic candidates only received 10.42% of the total votes cast in Arkansas. This is likely due to the fact that the Democratic Party only fielded a general election candidate in one of the state’s four House races.

There were two states in which the party that received the most total votes won a minority of seats, Virginia and Wisconsin. In Virginia, Democratic candidates received 49.17% of votes but only won 36.36% of seats , while Republican candidates received 48.74% of votes and won 63.64% of seats . In Wisconsin, Democratic candidates received 49.85% of votes but won 37.5% of seats , while Republican candidates received 45.89% of votes and won 62.5% of seats .

United States House Votes by Party and State State

R Favored

Whocontrols State Legislaturesin States With Changes

Thirteen states were affected by the 2020 Census’ shift in congressional seats.

States are given the task of redrawing districts whenthey gainor loseseats.

Michael Li, senior counsel for the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program,saidthe country could be poised for a battle overgerrymandering, the practice of redrawing district lines to favor one party over the other or to suppress the vote of communities of color.

In some states, the process is fairer than others, he said, because they are not controlled by just one political party or they have instituted an independent redistricting committee, such as in Michigan. But for other states, the party in power stands to control the map.

Just How Bad Was The 2018 Election For House Republicans

Chris Cillizza

On Thursday, Democrat Jared Golden beat Maine Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin, marking the 33rd seat pickup for Democrats in the 2018 election.

There are seven races in the House left uncalled all are Republican-held seats; Democrats lead in five of the seven. If they win all the races where their candidates are winning at the moment, Democrats will net 38 seats. If they lose them all which is very unlikely they will hold at a 33-seat gain.

In an interview Wednesday with the conservative Daily Caller website, President Donald Trump insisted that by his aggressive last-minute campaigning across the country he had saved House Republicans from seat losses that could have numbered into the 70s. I think I did very well, he concluded.

So did he? As compared to history?

Not really, is the answer.

Theres no question that Trump did not suffer the massive seat loss that his immediate predecessor Barack Obama did in his first midterm election in 2010. In that election, Republicans netted an astounding 63-seat gain, the largest since Democrats lost 72 House seats in the 1938 midterms.

But more broadly, the 33 seat loss by Republicans in 2018 places this election firmly in the upper echelon of House-seat losses by a presidents party in modern midterms.

Read Thursdays full edition of The Point newsletter, and to get future editions delivered to your inbox.

Rising Violent Crime Is Likely To Present A Political Challenge For Democrats In 2022

But there are roadblocks to fully enacting Democrats’ agenda. Their thin majorities in both chambers of Congress mean nearly all Democrats have to get on board with every agenda item in order to push through major legislative priorities. And without adjusting or eliminating the legislative filibuster in the Senate, Democrats need 10 Republicans to join them for various legislation a near-impossible task.

Betting On Major Domestic Policy Programs

“We’re making a bet on substance,” Maloney says, before adding a colorful adage: “What’s the old saying any jackass can kick down a barn, it takes a carpenter to build one. It’s harder to build it than to kick it down. And so we’re the party that’s going to build the future.”

That future includes proposals to combat climate change; overhaul immigration laws; massively invest in traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges and expanded access to broadband, along with investments in affordable child care and early childhood education; and provide an expanded child tax credit with payments that top out at $3,600 a year per child.

Tens of millions of American families are already starting to receive those direct cash payments.

“That’s a huge thing for a family trying to pay for the kids’ basketball shoes or keep food in the fridge till Saturday when it’s been running out on Thursday,” Maloney says.

The monthly credit is scheduled to last one year, but some Democrats have already discussed making it permanent.

The influx of government aid is projected to cut poverty nearly in half in 2021, according to a new analysis from The Urban Institute first reported in The New York Times.

“No Democratic majority, no Democratic president, has made this much progress in a long time,” Maloney says.

The Number Of People Each House Member Represents Will Change

The number of residents represented by each House member will mostly growin 2022, though it will decrease per representative in some states.

Since Montana gained a representative, its two House members will now split the state’s population currently represented by Rep. Matt Rosendale, a Republican. The addition of another House seat means Montana’s House members will represent the least amount of people compared to House members in other states.

Delaware’s sole House district, currently held by Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, will be the largest in terms of population.

Republicans Are Expected To Gain Seats In Redrawn 2022 Congressional Maps But Democrats Could Be Worse Off

U.S. Census data released Monday will shift political power in Congress, reapportioning two House seats to Texas and one each to Florida, North Carolina, Oregon, Colorado, and Montana and stripping a seat from California , New York , Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and West Virginia. Florida, Texas, and Arizona each controlled entirely by Republicans had been expecting to pick up an additional seat.

“On balance, I think this reapportionment offers a small boost for Republicans, but the bigger boost is likely to come from how Republicans draw these seats in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia,” the Cook Political Report‘s Dave Wasserman tells Axios. “Reapportionment itself means little compared to the redistricting fights to come.” It won’t exactly be a level playing field.

“Republicans control the redistricting process in far more states than do Democrats, because of GOP dominance in down-ballot elections,”The New York Times reports. “Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted redistricting decisions in states where they have controlled the government such as California, Colorado, and Virginia to independent commissions intended to create fair maps.”

House seats broken down by final redistricting authority :

– Republican: 187

Dave Wasserman April 26, 2021

More stories from theweek.com

The Justice Department Puts States On Notice About Election Audits And Voting Changes

“If they’re going to try to rely on rigging this game, because they don’t have a plan for the future and they can’t talk to the voters about their ideas and their vision, well, I think that makes me proud to be a Democrat.”

Maloney also posits that GOP turnout will be depressed in an election that doesn’t feature former President Donald Trump himself.

“There’s no evidence that this toxic Trump message will motivate voters without Trump on the ballot,” he says. “If the other side is making one big mistake, I think that might be it, which is a doubling down on this toxic Trump message of division and anger and racism and yet there’s no evidence they can pull out voters with the message without the messenger.”

He points to Texas Republican Jake Ellzey as a recent example. Ellzey was sworn in to the House on Friday, days after winning a special election that saw him defeat a Trump-backed candidate.

Maloney underscores: “It seems like the Trump endorsement’s not what it used to be.”

Here are more highlights from his conversation with NPR’s Susan Davis.

On polarization in Congress:

On the Republican Party:

On his own reelection in 2022:

Facebook

Republicans Are Well Positioned To Take The House In 2022

Although we dont yet know the winners of some House races, we can already look ahead to the 2022 midterms and see a fairly straightforward path for the GOP to capture the House. Midterm elections historically go well for the party thats not in the White House, and the out-of-power party is especially likely to do well in the House, since every seat is up for election .

Since the end of World War II, the presidential party has lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections, as the chart below shows. No matter how many seats Democrats end up with after 2020s election at this point, they will probably end up somewhere in the low 220s a loss of that magnitude would easily be enough for Republicans to retake the House.

The recent history of midterms in a Democratic presidents first term seems especially promising for the GOP, too. Following Bill Clintons election in 1992, Democrats lost more than 50 seats in 1994, and after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Democrats lost more than 60 seats.

If Democrats had added five to 10 seats this year, they could have survived a 20-seat loss in the midterms. Instead, Republicans will probably need to win fewer than 10 seats to gain a slender majority in 2022.

Numerous Freshman Democrats Lost Reelection

The vulnerable first-term Democrats who Decision Desk HQ projects to lose reelection are Reps. TJ Cox, Gil Cisneros, and Harley Rouda of California, Reps. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala of Florida, Rep. Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, Rep. Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico, Rep. Max Rose of New York, Rep. Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, and Rep. Ben McAdams of Utah.

Rep. Collin Peterson, a long-serving Democratic representative in a Minnesota district that Trump won by 30 points, also lost reelection.

Some House Democrats who flipped Republican suburban and exurban seats in 2018 did win reelection, however, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, Rep. Katie Porter of California, Reps. Elaine Luria, Abigail Spanberger, and Jennifer Wexton of Virginia, and Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey.

Important Dates And Deadlines

The table below lists filing deadlines and primary dates in each state for Democratic Party and Republican Party candidates for congressional and state-level office.

Primary dates and filing deadlines, 2020 State Filing deadline for primary candidates Primary date 04/21/2020 & 05/08/2020 08/04/2020 04/24/2020 & 6/12/2020 05/05/2020 & 06/02/2020 09/01/2020 06/24/2020 07/10/2020

The embedded spreadsheet below details filing requirements for major-party and unaffiliated congressional candidates in 2020.

States That Gained Seats

The three most populous states to gain seats are Texas, Florida and North Carolina, and in each, Republicans will control the redistricting process. For the first time in decades, they wont have to seek preclearance from the Justice Department either before implementing their maps thanks to the 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. That, in turn, could open the door for more extreme gerrymandering in these states, which historically disenfranchised voters of color.

For instance, Republicans will at least try to draw Texass two new districts to be as safe as possible for Republicans. But they also face the challenge that Texass suburbs its fastest-growing areas are rapidly becoming more Democratic, which threatened to blow up their 2011 gerrymander. According to Daily Kos Elections, Biden came within 3 percentage points of carrying 22 out of Texass current 36 districts in the 2020 election. So in an effort to shore up Republican incumbents in some areas, the Texas legislature may be forced to create safe new districts for Democrats in places like Austin, Dallas or Houston. But even if one or both of the new seats are blue, Texass map will still likely benefit Republicans overall , muddying the question of which party truly benefits from reapportionment here.

[dyingroses]

#isaac in the background: no he’s got a point#moe in the bushes: answer the question!#jamie expects privileges if he’s marrying the manager

jamie: do we still have to get up at 4am to train?

roy, down on one knee (which took him a few minutes to do), literally proposing: is that really what you’re worried about right now?

[patriotsnet]

How Many Seats Did Republicans Gain In The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-seats-did-republicans-gain-in-the-house/

How Many Seats Did Republicans Gain In The House

What To Watch For

Following the Census count, all states are tasked with drawing new legislative district maps that reflect the population shifts. Most states leave that responsibility up to the legislatures, though more states are now handing the process off to an independent commission. Because of Republicans dominance in statewide elections, they control the redistricting process in more states than Democrats do. Republicans are in charge of line-drawing for 187 congressional seats, while Democrats control just 87, according to the Cook Political Report. Population growth in states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina, means the GOP is to increase its grip on power. Some House members who represent districts in states that lost seatssuch as West Virginiawill be forced to retire or try and win in a new district running against another incumbent in their state.

Democrats Flip 39 Seats In Latest Tally As Losing Gop Rep Mia Love Tears Into Republicans Over Treatment Of Minorities

Democrats made a net gain of 39 House seats in this year’s midterm elections, NBC News has concluded, after Democrat Ben McAdams defeated GOP Rep. Mia Love in Utah’s 4th Congressional District.

That race was NBC News’ lone remaining uncalled contest.

The gains that propelled Democrats to retake the majority in the House come on the back of the largest margin of victory, in terms of total votes, that either party has seen in a midterm election. Democrats held the prior record for vote margin, which came in 1974 with the backdrop of the Watergate scandal.

Though President Donald Trump’s first midterm election was not particularly kind to him, it is common for the party not in control of the White House to make significant gains in that initial midterm. On the House side, President Barack Obama saw Republicans make a 63-seat net gain in 2010, while President Bill Clinton watched as the GOP picked up 54 seats in 1994.

Its Not All Bad News For Democrats

While it was unquestionably a good night for Republicans, Democrats still held onto most of the seats they won in 2018 and will continue to be the majority party in the House. Thats in part because they retained most of the suburban districts they picked up in 2018.

Of the 233 seats that Democrats held coming into the election, 186 of them were in districts that were predominantly or partly suburban in nature, according to density categorizations by Bloombergs CityLab. Thus far, Democrats have lost seven of those seats, but they captured one GOP-held suburban seat around Atlanta. And thanks to redistricting, theyve also won two formerly Republican seats around Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina, which reflect the partys strength in more populous areas.

Because of their relative success in the suburbs, Democrats kept many seats in places President Trump won in 2016. Coming into the election, Democrats held 30 seats in districts Trump carried in 2016, and they wouldve lost their majority if theyd lost more than half of them . But theyve won 18 of them so far and picked up one from the GOP . In fact, more than half of Republicans gains have come in seats representing places that Trump won by a pretty sizable margin in 2016. Well have to wait a bit before data can tell us how congressional districts voted in 2020, but for now it seems many Republican gains were made by picking off the lowest-hanging fruit.

Trump Shames Republicans Who Lost Midterms Did Not ’embrace’ His Support

“The president’s behavior towards me made me wonder, what did he have to gain by saying such a thing about a fellow Republican?” Love said. “It was not really about asking him to do more, was it? Or was it something else? Well, Mr. President, we’ll have to chat about that. However, this gave me a clear vision of his world as it is no real relationships, just convenient transactions. That is an insufficient way to implement sincere service and policy.”

Love then tore into Republicans for their treatment of minority voters before vigorously defending conservative policies as more beneficial to all Americans.

“Because Republicans never take minority communities into their home and citizens into their home and into their hearts, they stay with Democrats and bureaucrats in Washington because they do take them home or at least make them feel like they have a home,” Love said. “I’ve seen the cost of conservatives for not truly taking people into their hearts.”

“Democrats saw newly elected black members and women into Congress this election,” she continued. “This is a matter of fact that Republicans lost in this regard. However, minority communities need to ask themselves this question also: At what cost? What is the cost of staying with the Democrat Party that perpetually delivers exactly what you need to stay exactly where you are?”

This story has been updated to reflect NBC’s retraction of its call for the Republican in California’s 21st congressional district.

Why Did The Republicans Perform So Well In The Us Congressional Elections

Three factors played a part: preconceptions, policyand polls.

One of the manyironies of Republican support forPresident Donald Trumps effortstochallenge the outcome of the 2020 election is that the Republican Party, save the president himself, actually did very well in it. Unless the Democrats manage to win both runoffs in the special election early in January, Republicans will keep the Senate. While Democrats held on to their majority in the House, the margin of that majority has shrunk, leaving the party to worryabout 2022 already.

This was unexpected:Joe Biden was polling ahead, yes, but so were Democrats in many congressional races. Yetrelative Republican success followed. The Republican Senator Susan Collins, who was expected to lose her Maine seat, not only won, but won quite comfortably. In Iowa, almost all polls besides the states own Des Moines Registershowed a tight presidential race. In fact, not only did Trump win the state, but the Republican Senator Joni Ernsther seat and the Democratic Representative Abby Finkenauer lost hers.

All of which raises the question: what went right for Republicansand wrong for Democrats?

There are three possible answers: preconceptions, policy and polls.

Theres a third possibility,which is that polls were wide off the mark about support for Trump, and for the Republicans more generally.

Watch Georgia North Carolina Florida And Arizona

Nathan L. Gonzales

ANALYSIS More than 16 months before Election Day, new House district lines havent even been drawn, and yet the fight for Congress is likely to hinge on the outcomes in four critical states.

On a basic level, every state matters in the Senate, considering Republicans need to gain just a single seat to get to the majority. Each significant recruitment development would instantly affect the handicapping of a race and the fight for control. But there are other states less dependent on a single candidate.

Every seat also matters in the House, where Republicans need a net gain of five seats for a majority a paltry number in a body of 435 members and in the face of the midterm history, which favors the party out of the White House. And some states, such as Texas, are of particular importance to one of the chambers. But a handful of states are hosting competitive races that will affect control of both the House and the Senate.

Incumbents Who Sought Other Offices

U.S. House members who ran for President

1 Democratic member of the U.S. House

Running for president, 2020

U.S. House members who sought a seat in the U.S. Senate

2 Democratic members of the U.S. House

3 Republican members of the U.S. House

Running for Senate, 2020

U.S. House members who ran for governor

1 Republican member of the U.S. House

Running for governor, 2020

U.S. House members who ran for another office

2 Republican members of the U.S. House

1 Democratic member of the U.S. House

Running for another office, 2020 Name No

An Incoming Class Of History

Several of the newly elected state representatives are making history.

The Republican Madison Cawthorn, 25, who beat the Democrat Moe Davis to represent North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, will become the youngest member of Congress in modern history.

The Democrat Cori Bush is set to become the first Black congresswoman from Missouri after winning in the state’s 1st Congressional District.

The Democrats Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres will also be the first openly gay Black men to serve in Congress, after winning in New York’s 17th and 15th districts respectively.

And nine out of the eleven Republicans who have so far unseated incumbent Democrats are women wins that will drastically expand the representation of women and especially of women of color in the House Republican caucus.

Currently, there are just 13 voting female Republican representatives in the House and 11 female Republican incumbents who ran for reelection in 2020.

Why Did House Democrats Underperform Compared To Joe Biden

The results of the 2020 elections pose several puzzles, one of which is the gap between Joe Bidens handsome victory in the presidential race and the Democrats disappointing performance in the House of Representatives. Biden enjoyed an edge of 7.1 million votes over President Trump, while the Democrats suffered a loss of 13 seats in the House, reducing their margin from 36 to just 10.

Turnout in the 2018 mid-term election reached its highest level in more than a century. Democrats were fervently opposed to the Trump administration and turned out in droves. Compared to its performance in 2016, the partys total House vote fell by only 2%. Without Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, Republican voters were much less enthusiastic, and the total House vote for Republican candidates fell by nearly 20% from 2016. Democratic candidates received almost 10 million more votes than Republican candidates, a margin of 8.6%, the highest ever for a party that was previously in the minority. It was, in short, a spectacular year for House Democrats.

To understand the difference this Democratic disadvantage can make, compare the 2020 presidential and House results in five critical swing states.

Table 1: Presidential versus House results

Arizona

How Republicans Pulled Off A Big Upset And Nearly Took Back The House

Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN

There seemed to be one safe bet when it came to the 2020 election results: Democrats would easily hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. Not only that, but the conventional wisdom held that Democrats would pick up more than the 235 seats they won in the 2018 midterm elections.

will have a majority has projectedJack Kersting FiveThirtyEight clockedThe Economist modelfinal polling averages at the Crystal Ballwhat polls suggestedCook Political ReportInside Electionsare leading

Incumbents Defeated In Primary Elections

The following table lists incumbents defeated in 2020 House primary elections or conventions.

Incumbents defeated in primaries

See also: Incumbents defeated in 2018 congressional elections

In the 2018 midterm elections, 378 U.S. House incumbents ran for re-election. This was the lowest number of U.S. House incumbents seeking re-election since 1992.

Thirty-four incumbents9 percentlost their re-election bids. That included two Democrats and 32 Republicans. This was the highest percentage of incumbents defeated since 2012, when 10.2 percent were not re-elected.

The following data for congressional re-election rates from 2000 to 2016 was reported in Vital Statistics, a joint research project of the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. Find the original datasets and methodology . Data for the 2018 election came from .

Defeated U.S. House incumbents by party, 2000-2018 Year

U.S. House incumbents retired, defeated, or reelected, 2000-2018 Year Percentage of those seeking reelection 2018 97.8

Popular Vote By Party And State

The following table displays the total number of votes received and the number of seats won by party for each state in the 2016 U.S. House elections. It also compares the percentage of the total vote received by each party to the percentage of seats in the state won by each party. Some interesting facts:

Republican candidates received 49.13% of total votes cast in 2016 and won 55.4% of U.S. House seats. Comparatively, Democratic candidates received 48.03% of votes and won 44.6% of races. Third-party and write-in candidates received 2.56% of votes.

Third-party candidates received the highest percentage of votes in Arkansas with 18.42% of votes cast. Comparatively, Democratic candidates only received 10.42% of the total votes cast in Arkansas. This is likely due to the fact that the Democratic Party only fielded a general election candidate in one of the state’s four House races.

There were two states in which the party that received the most total votes won a minority of seats, Virginia and Wisconsin. In Virginia, Democratic candidates received 49.17% of votes but only won 36.36% of seats , while Republican candidates received 48.74% of votes and won 63.64% of seats . In Wisconsin, Democratic candidates received 49.85% of votes but won 37.5% of seats , while Republican candidates received 45.89% of votes and won 62.5% of seats .

United States House Votes by Party and State State

R Favored

Whocontrols State Legislaturesin States With Changes

Thirteen states were affected by the 2020 Census’ shift in congressional seats.

States are given the task of redrawing districts whenthey gainor loseseats.

Michael Li, senior counsel for the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program,saidthe country could be poised for a battle overgerrymandering, the practice of redrawing district lines to favor one party over the other or to suppress the vote of communities of color.

In some states, the process is fairer than others, he said, because they are not controlled by just one political party or they have instituted an independent redistricting committee, such as in Michigan. But for other states, the party in power stands to control the map.

Just How Bad Was The 2018 Election For House Republicans

Chris Cillizza

On Thursday, Democrat Jared Golden beat Maine Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin, marking the 33rd seat pickup for Democrats in the 2018 election.

There are seven races in the House left uncalled all are Republican-held seats; Democrats lead in five of the seven. If they win all the races where their candidates are winning at the moment, Democrats will net 38 seats. If they lose them all which is very unlikely they will hold at a 33-seat gain.

In an interview Wednesday with the conservative Daily Caller website, President Donald Trump insisted that by his aggressive last-minute campaigning across the country he had saved House Republicans from seat losses that could have numbered into the 70s. I think I did very well, he concluded.

So did he? As compared to history?

Not really, is the answer.

Theres no question that Trump did not suffer the massive seat loss that his immediate predecessor Barack Obama did in his first midterm election in 2010. In that election, Republicans netted an astounding 63-seat gain, the largest since Democrats lost 72 House seats in the 1938 midterms.

But more broadly, the 33 seat loss by Republicans in 2018 places this election firmly in the upper echelon of House-seat losses by a presidents party in modern midterms.

Read Thursdays full edition of The Point newsletter, and to get future editions delivered to your inbox.

Rising Violent Crime Is Likely To Present A Political Challenge For Democrats In 2022

But there are roadblocks to fully enacting Democrats’ agenda. Their thin majorities in both chambers of Congress mean nearly all Democrats have to get on board with every agenda item in order to push through major legislative priorities. And without adjusting or eliminating the legislative filibuster in the Senate, Democrats need 10 Republicans to join them for various legislation a near-impossible task.

Betting On Major Domestic Policy Programs

“We’re making a bet on substance,” Maloney says, before adding a colorful adage: “What’s the old saying any jackass can kick down a barn, it takes a carpenter to build one. It’s harder to build it than to kick it down. And so we’re the party that’s going to build the future.”

That future includes proposals to combat climate change; overhaul immigration laws; massively invest in traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges and expanded access to broadband, along with investments in affordable child care and early childhood education; and provide an expanded child tax credit with payments that top out at $3,600 a year per child.

Tens of millions of American families are already starting to receive those direct cash payments.

“That’s a huge thing for a family trying to pay for the kids’ basketball shoes or keep food in the fridge till Saturday when it’s been running out on Thursday,” Maloney says.

The monthly credit is scheduled to last one year, but some Democrats have already discussed making it permanent.

The influx of government aid is projected to cut poverty nearly in half in 2021, according to a new analysis from The Urban Institute first reported in The New York Times.

“No Democratic majority, no Democratic president, has made this much progress in a long time,” Maloney says.

The Number Of People Each House Member Represents Will Change

The number of residents represented by each House member will mostly growin 2022, though it will decrease per representative in some states.

Since Montana gained a representative, its two House members will now split the state’s population currently represented by Rep. Matt Rosendale, a Republican. The addition of another House seat means Montana’s House members will represent the least amount of people compared to House members in other states.

Delaware’s sole House district, currently held by Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, will be the largest in terms of population.

Republicans Are Expected To Gain Seats In Redrawn 2022 Congressional Maps But Democrats Could Be Worse Off

U.S. Census data released Monday will shift political power in Congress, reapportioning two House seats to Texas and one each to Florida, North Carolina, Oregon, Colorado, and Montana and stripping a seat from California , New York , Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and West Virginia. Florida, Texas, and Arizona each controlled entirely by Republicans had been expecting to pick up an additional seat.

“On balance, I think this reapportionment offers a small boost for Republicans, but the bigger boost is likely to come from how Republicans draw these seats in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia,” the Cook Political Report‘s Dave Wasserman tells Axios. “Reapportionment itself means little compared to the redistricting fights to come.” It won’t exactly be a level playing field.

“Republicans control the redistricting process in far more states than do Democrats, because of GOP dominance in down-ballot elections,”The New York Times reports. “Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted redistricting decisions in states where they have controlled the government such as California, Colorado, and Virginia to independent commissions intended to create fair maps.”

House seats broken down by final redistricting authority :

– Republican: 187

Dave Wasserman April 26, 2021

More stories from theweek.com

The Justice Department Puts States On Notice About Election Audits And Voting Changes

“If they’re going to try to rely on rigging this game, because they don’t have a plan for the future and they can’t talk to the voters about their ideas and their vision, well, I think that makes me proud to be a Democrat.”

Maloney also posits that GOP turnout will be depressed in an election that doesn’t feature former President Donald Trump himself.

“There’s no evidence that this toxic Trump message will motivate voters without Trump on the ballot,” he says. “If the other side is making one big mistake, I think that might be it, which is a doubling down on this toxic Trump message of division and anger and racism and yet there’s no evidence they can pull out voters with the message without the messenger.”

He points to Texas Republican Jake Ellzey as a recent example. Ellzey was sworn in to the House on Friday, days after winning a special election that saw him defeat a Trump-backed candidate.

Maloney underscores: “It seems like the Trump endorsement’s not what it used to be.”

Here are more highlights from his conversation with NPR’s Susan Davis.

On polarization in Congress:

On the Republican Party:

On his own reelection in 2022:

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Republicans Are Well Positioned To Take The House In 2022

Although we dont yet know the winners of some House races, we can already look ahead to the 2022 midterms and see a fairly straightforward path for the GOP to capture the House. Midterm elections historically go well for the party thats not in the White House, and the out-of-power party is especially likely to do well in the House, since every seat is up for election .

Since the end of World War II, the presidential party has lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections, as the chart below shows. No matter how many seats Democrats end up with after 2020s election at this point, they will probably end up somewhere in the low 220s a loss of that magnitude would easily be enough for Republicans to retake the House.

The recent history of midterms in a Democratic presidents first term seems especially promising for the GOP, too. Following Bill Clintons election in 1992, Democrats lost more than 50 seats in 1994, and after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Democrats lost more than 60 seats.

If Democrats had added five to 10 seats this year, they could have survived a 20-seat loss in the midterms. Instead, Republicans will probably need to win fewer than 10 seats to gain a slender majority in 2022.

Numerous Freshman Democrats Lost Reelection

The vulnerable first-term Democrats who Decision Desk HQ projects to lose reelection are Reps. TJ Cox, Gil Cisneros, and Harley Rouda of California, Reps. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala of Florida, Rep. Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, Rep. Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico, Rep. Max Rose of New York, Rep. Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, and Rep. Ben McAdams of Utah.

Rep. Collin Peterson, a long-serving Democratic representative in a Minnesota district that Trump won by 30 points, also lost reelection.

Some House Democrats who flipped Republican suburban and exurban seats in 2018 did win reelection, however, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, Rep. Katie Porter of California, Reps. Elaine Luria, Abigail Spanberger, and Jennifer Wexton of Virginia, and Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey.

Important Dates And Deadlines

The table below lists filing deadlines and primary dates in each state for Democratic Party and Republican Party candidates for congressional and state-level office.

Primary dates and filing deadlines, 2020 State Filing deadline for primary candidates Primary date 04/21/2020 & 05/08/2020 08/04/2020 04/24/2020 & 6/12/2020 05/05/2020 & 06/02/2020 09/01/2020 06/24/2020 07/10/2020

The embedded spreadsheet below details filing requirements for major-party and unaffiliated congressional candidates in 2020.

States That Gained Seats

The three most populous states to gain seats are Texas, Florida and North Carolina, and in each, Republicans will control the redistricting process. For the first time in decades, they wont have to seek preclearance from the Justice Department either before implementing their maps thanks to the 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. That, in turn, could open the door for more extreme gerrymandering in these states, which historically disenfranchised voters of color.

For instance, Republicans will at least try to draw Texass two new districts to be as safe as possible for Republicans. But they also face the challenge that Texass suburbs its fastest-growing areas are rapidly becoming more Democratic, which threatened to blow up their 2011 gerrymander. According to Daily Kos Elections, Biden came within 3 percentage points of carrying 22 out of Texass current 36 districts in the 2020 election. So in an effort to shore up Republican incumbents in some areas, the Texas legislature may be forced to create safe new districts for Democrats in places like Austin, Dallas or Houston. But even if one or both of the new seats are blue, Texass map will still likely benefit Republicans overall , muddying the question of which party truly benefits from reapportionment here.